DRAMA. COMEDY. TRUMP!
On the US election beat with photographer Mark Peterson

AFTER THE COUP,
THE RIOTS

MAIN STREET
BREXITLAND
People in England’s northern towns and cities are scared. Their fears stoked by
xenophobic right-wing media, they hate Europe and they hate migrants. But, most of
all, they hate the way they are being squeezed into poverty by a post-industrial society
that has turned their dreams into nightmares and replaced hope with despair

Find us at www.coldtype.net/reader.html
or at www.issuu.com/coldtype
2 ColdType | August 2017 | www.coldtype.net

POWER PLAY: Hamburg cops prepare for a night of anarchy before the Hamburg G20 summit.

Photo: Thorsten Schröder, Flickr.com

Hamburg: The G20 from Hell
Pepe Escobar reports on a ‘noxious military dystopia’ disguised as a global summit
While leaders
worked the rooms,
gossiped, listened
to the Ode to Joy
and indulged in
the proverbial
banquet, outside
there was burning
and looting

A

future history of the G20 in Hamburg
might start with a question posed by
President Donald Trump – actually
his speechwriter – a few days earlier
in Warsaw: “The fundamental question of
our time is whether the West has the will
to survive.”
What initially amounted to a juvenile/reductionist clash of civilisations tirade written by Stephen Miller – the same one who
penned the “American carnage” epic on
Trump’s inauguration as well as the original Muslim travel ban – might actually have

4 ColdType | August 2017 | www.coldtype.net

found some answers in Hamburg.
The G20 as a whole was a noxious military dystopia disguised as a global summit.
“Welcome to Hell” and other assorted protests, on multiple levels, were answering
another Trump-in-Warsaw question: “Do
we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilisation in the face of those
who would subvert and destroy it?”
While leaders worked the rooms, gossiped, listened to the Ode to Joy and indulged
in the proverbial banquet, outside there was
burning and looting; a vicious, street-level

commentary not only about their concept
of “civilisation” but also about Trump-inWarsaw conveniently forgetting to say that
it’s US and NATO’s “policies” which end up
generating the terror blowback that threaten “civilisation”, “our values” and our “will
to survive.”
And it will get worse. Starting next year,
a Bundeswehr/NATO joint production,
a ghost town built in a military training
camp in Sachsen-Anhalt – incidentally, not
far from Hamburg — will become a prime
site teaching urban warfare. Austerity is far
from over, and euro-peasants are bound to
continue rebelling en masse.
The temptation is sweet to identify the
emerging new order as a Putin-Xi-TrumpMerkel world. But not yet – and not yet as
multilateral. What we’re seeing is the trappings of multilateralism, but not yet the real
www.coldtype.net | August 2017 | ColdType

5

War Summit
Everyone knows it,
everyone agrees,
but that element
of Washington’s
“our way or
the highway”
geoeconomic
policy won’t vanish
anytime soon

BLACK POWER: Cops spray their way through a crowd of protesters.

deal – resisted by Washington on myriad
levels.
Frau Merkel wanted “her” summit to focus on three crucial issues: climate change,
free trade and management of mass global
migration – none particularly appealing to
Trump, a believer in a Darwinian approach
to global politics. So what the world got was
an unexciting muddle through – inbuilt
contradictions included.
The Boss, once again, was Chinese President Xi Jinping, calling on G20 members to
privilege an open global economy, strengthen economic policy coordination, and be
aware of the enormous risks inherent in financial turbo-capitalism. He duly called for
a “multilateral trade regime.”
To back it up, China deftly applied giant
panda diplomacy – offering two of them,
Meng Meng and Jiao Qing, to the Berlin
zoo as a friendship gesture. Merkel’s commentary was not so cuddly, “Beijing views
Europe as an Asian peninsula. We see it differently.”
Well, for all practical purposes, what Chinese and German business interests do see

6 ColdType | August 2017 | www.coldtype.net

Photo: Thorsten Schröder / Flickr.com

further on down the road is Eurasia integration – with the 21st-century New Silk Roads,
aka Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) starting
in eastern China and ending in the Ruhr valley. Now that’s a practical definition of how
a “multilateral trade regime” should work.
Add to it the just-clinched, massive trade
deal between the EU and Japan. For all practical purposes, geopolitically and geoeconomically, Germany is moving East.
The BRICs nations – China, India, Russia, Brazil and South Africa – met on the
sidelines and, what else, called for a “rulesbased, transparent, non-discriminatory,
open and inclusive multilateral trading system.”
President Putin went one up – stressing
financial sanctions under political pretexts
hurt mutual confidence and damage the
global economy. Everyone knows it, everyone agrees, but that element of Washington’s “our way or the highway” geoeconomic policy won’t vanish anytime soon.
And then we had the anti-globalisation
group Attac, criticising Merkel for staging a
“cynical production.” As much as the chan-

War Summit
cellor was positioning herself as “leader of
the free world,” the German government
“is actually pursuing an aggressive export
surplus strategy.” And here we had left/progressive Attac totally aligned with Donald
Trump.
The sherpas in Hamburg were involved
in their own brand of “Welcome to Hell.”
Merkel’s euphemism – “tense discussions”
– masked a de facto mutiny against the US
sherpas on both climate change and trade,
bitterly fighting to the last minute a US
clause on Washington “helping” countries
access clean fossil fuels.
In the end we got the proverbial muddle
through. Here’s the paragraph in the final
communiqué that singles out the Trump
administration’s decision to abandon the
Paris agreement: “We take note of the decision of the United States of America to
withdraw from the Paris Agreement. The
United States of America announced it will
immediately cease the implementation of
its current nationally-determined contribution and affirms its strong commitment to
an approach that lowers emissions while
supporting economic growth and improving energy security needs. The United States
of America states it will endeavour to work
closely with other countries to help them
access and use fossil fuels more cleanly and
efficiently and help deploy renewable and
other clean energy sources, given the importance of energy access and security in
their nationally determined contributions.”
Directly following that paragraph is this
one, concerning the G19:“The leaders of
the other G20 members state that the Paris
Agreement is irreversible. We reiterate the
importance of fulfilling the UNFCCC commitment by developed countries in providing means of implementation including financial resources to assist developing countries with respect to both mitigation and adaptation actions in line with Paris outcomes
and note the OECD’s report Investing In
Climate, Investing In Growth. We reaffirm
our strong commitment to the Paris Agree-

ment, moving swiftly towards its full implementation in accordance with the principle
of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, in the light
of different national circumstances and, to
this end, we agree to the G20 Hamburg Climate and Energy Action Plan for Growth as
set out in the Annex.”
In Hamburg, the Trump Organisation
was all over the place. First Daughter Ivanka
even took Daddy’s chair at the forum for
fleeting moments while he was away on bilaterals. Yet she did perform on substance,
unveiling a $300-million programme at the
World Bank providing loans, mentoring and
access to the financial markets for womenled start-ups in the developing world. Both
the White House and the World Bank credited Ivanka for the idea.
Away from hellish issues, under a sunnier perspective, wind and solar power are set
to become the cheapest form of power generation across the G20 by 2030. Already in
2017, over a third of German electricity has
come from wind, solar, biomass and hydro,
at 35 percent (in the US is only 15 percent).
So Germany is not green, yet – but it’s getting there fast.
In Hamburg, Merkel collected a win on
climate change, a relative win on trade
(with the US self-excluded), but a miserable
loss on mass migration. No NATO power at
the G20 would have had the balls to publicly connect the dots between ghastly US/
NATO wars in Afghanistan, Libya, the Syrian
proxy war generating millions of refugees
for whom the only hope is Europe.
Geopolitically, Washington is de facto
cutting off Germany while England has zero
power left. The Trump administration considers both Germany and Japan as enemies
who are destroying US industry through
currency rigging. In the medium term, it’s
fair to expect Germany to slowly but surely
re-approach Russia. As much as Washington’s unipolar moment may be fading fast,
the Game of Thrones in the G20 realm is
just beginning.
CT

No NATO power
at the G20 would
have had the
balls to publicly
connect the dots
between ghastly
US/NATO wars
in Afghanistan,
Libya, the Syrian
proxy war
generating millions
of refugees for
whom the only
hope is Europe

Pepe Escobar
is the author of
Globalistan: How
the Globalized
World is Dissolving
into Liquid War
(Nimble Books,
2007), Red Zone
Blues: a Snapshot of
Baghdad During the
Surge, and Obama
Does Globalistan
(Nimble Books,
2009). His latest
book is Empire of
Chaos.

www.coldtype.net | August 2017 | ColdType

7

Whose Sarin?

Pursuing some
hard truths in Syria
A UN agency says it found sarin in victims of an April 4 attack in Syria, but
the lack of a plausible weapon and unreliability of pro-rebel witnesses make
the pursuit of truth difficult, writes WMD expert Scott Ritter
Mr Hersh’s article
has come under
attack from many
circles, the most
vociferous of these
being a UK-based
citizen activist
named Eliot Higgins

O

n the night of June 26, the White House
Press Secretary released a statement,
via Twitter, that, “the United States has
identified potential preparations for another chemical weapons attack by the Assad
regime that would likely result in the mass
murder of civilians, including innocent children.”
The tweet went on to declare that, “the
activities are similar to preparations the regime made before its April 4 chemical weapons attack,” before warning that if “Mr. Assad
conducts another mass murder attack using
chemical weapons, he and his military will
pay a heavy price.”
A Pentagon spokesman backed up the
White House tweet, stating that US intelligence had observed “activity” at a Syrian
air base that indicated “active preparation
for chemical weapons use” was underway. The air base in question, Shayrat, had
been implicated by the United States as the
origin of aircraft and munitions used in an
alleged chemical weapons attack on the
village of Khan Sheikhun on April 4. The
observed activity was at an aircraft hangar that had been struck by cruise missiles
fired by US Navy destroyers during a retaliatory strike on April 6.
The White House statement came on
the heels of the publication of an article by
Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in the German newspa-

8 ColdType | August 2017 | www.coldtype.net

per Die Welt which questions, among many
things, the validity of the intelligence underpinning the allegations levelled at Syria regarding the events of April 4 in and around
Khan Sheikhun. (In the interests of full disclosure, I assisted Mr. Hersh in fact-checking certain
aspects of his article; I was not a source of any
information used in his piece.)
Not surprisingly, Mr Hersh’s article has
come under attack from many circles,
the most vociferous of these being a UKbased citizen activist named Eliot Higgins
who, through his Bellingcat blog, has been
widely cited by media outlets in the US and
UK as a source of information implicating
the Syrian government in that alleged April
chemical attack on Khan Sheikhun.
Neither Hersh nor Higgins possesses definitive proof to bolster their respective positions: the latter draws upon assertions
made by supposed eyewitnesses backed up
with forensic testing of materials alleged to
be sourced to the scene of the attack that indicate the presence of Sarin, a deadly nerve
agent, while the former relies upon anonymous sources within the US military and
intelligence establishments who provide a
counter narrative to the official US government position. What is clear, however, is that
both cannot be right – either the Syrian government conducted a chemical weapons attack on Khan Sheikhun, or it didn’t. There is
no middle ground.

Header Header

REAL OR FAKE? White Helmets clean up after an alleged chemical weapons attack by the Syrian government at Khan Sheikhun.

Search for truth
The search for truth is as old as civilisation.
Philosophers throughout the ages have
struggled with the difficulties of rationalising
the beginning of existence, and the relationships between the one and the many.
Aristotle approached this challenge
through what he called the development
of potentiality to actuality, which examined truth in terms of the causes that act on
things. This approach is as relevant today as
it was two millennia prior, and its application to the problem of ascertaining fact from
fiction regarding Khan Sheikhun goes far in
helping unpack the White House statements
regarding Syrian chemical preparations and
the Hersh-Higgins debate.
According to Aristotle, there were four
causes that needed to be examined in the
search for truth – material, efficient, formal
and final. The material cause represents the
element out of which an object is created. In
terms of the present discussion, one could
speak of the material cause in terms of the

actual chemical weapon alleged to have been
used at Khan Sheikhun.
The odd thing about both the Khan
Sheikhun attack and the current White
House statements, however, is that no one
has produced any physical evidence of there
actually having been a chemical weapon, let
alone what kind of weapon was allegedly
employed. Like a prosecutor trying a murder
case without producing the actual murder
weapon, Syria’s accusers have assembled a
case that is purely circumstantial – plenty
of dead and dying victims, but nothing that
links these victims to an actual physical object.
Human Rights Watch (HRW), drawing
upon analysis of images brought to them by
the volunteer rescue organisation White Helmets, of fragments allegedly recovered from
the scene of the attack, has claimed that the
material cause of the Khan Sheikhun event
is a Soviet-made KhAB-250 chemical bomb,
purpose-built to deliver Sarin nerve agent.
There are several issues with the HRW as-

The odd thing
about both the
Khan Sheikhun
attack and the
current White
House statements,
however, is that no
one has produced
any physical
evidence of there
actually having
been a chemical
weapon, let
alone what kind
of weapon was
allegedly employed

www.coldtype.net | August 2017 | ColdType

9

Whose Sarin?
If a KhAB-250,
or any other air
delivered chemical
bomb, had been
used at Khan
Sheikhun, there
would be significant
physical evidence
of that fact,
including the
totality of the bomb
casing, the burster
tube, the tail fin
assembly,
and parachute

sessment.
First and foremost, there is no independent verification that the objects in question
are what HRW claims, or that they were
even physically present at Khan Sheikhun,
let alone deposited there as a result of an air
attack by the Syrian government. Moreover,
the KhAB-250 bomb was never exported by
either the Soviet or Russian governments,
thereby making the provenance of any such
ordinance in the Syrian inventory highly suspect.
Sarin is a non-persistent chemical agent
whose military function is to inflict casualties through direct exposure. Any ordnance
intended to deliver Sarin would, like the
KhAB-250, be designed to disseminate the
agent in aerosol form, fine droplets that
would be breathed in by the victim, or coat
the victim’s skin.
In combat, the aircraft delivering Sarin
munitions would be expected to minimise
its exposure to hostile fire, flying low to the
target at high speed. In order to have any
semblance of military utility, weapons delivered in this fashion would require an inherent braking mechanism, such as deployable
fins or a parachute, which would retard the
speed of the weapon, allowing for a more
concentrated application of the nerve agent
on the intended target.
Chemical ordnance is not intended for
precise strikes against point targets, but
rather delivery of the agent to an area. For
this reason, they are not dropped singly, but
rather in large numbers. (The ab-250, for
instance was designed to be delivered by a
TU-22 bomber dropping 24 weapons on the
same target.)
The weapon itself is not complex – a steel
bomb casing with a small high explosive
tube – the burster charge – running down its
middle, equipped with a nose fuse designed
to detonate on contact with the ground or at
a predetermined altitude. Once detonated,
the burster charge causes the casing to break
apart, disseminating fine droplets of agent
over the target. The resulting explosion is

10 ColdType | August 2017 | www.coldtype.net

very low order, a pop more than a bang –
virtually none of the actual weapon would
be destroyed as a result, and its component
parts, readily identifiable as such, would be
deposited in the immediate environs.
In short, if a KhAB-250, or any other air
delivered chemical bomb, had been used at
Khan Sheikhun, there would be significant
physical evidence of that fact, including the
totality of the bomb casing, the burster tube,
the tail fin assembly, and parachute. The fact
that none of this exists belies the notion that
an air-delivered chemical bomb was employed by the Syrian government against
Khan Sheikhun.
Continuing along the lines of Aristotle’s
exploration of the relationship between the
potential and actual, the efficient cause represents the means by which the object is created. In the context of Khan Shiekhun, the
issue (ie, object) isn’t the physical weapon
itself, but rather its manifestation on the
ground in terms of cause and effect. Nothing
symbolised this more than the disturbing
images that emerged in the aftermath of the
alleged chemical attack of civilian victims,
many of them women and children. (It was
these images that spurred President Trump
into ordering the cruise missile attack on
Shayrat air base.)
The White Helmet role
These images were produced by the White
Helmet organisation as a by-product of the
emergency response that transpired in and
around Khan Sheikhun on April 4. It is this
response, therefore, than can be said to constitute the efficient cause in any examination
of potential to actuality regarding the allegations of the use of chemical weapons by the
Syrian government there.
The White Helmets came into existence
in the aftermath of the unrest that erupted
in Syria after the Arab Spring in 2012. They
say they are neutral, but they have used their
now-global platform as a humanitarian rescue unit to promote anti-regime themes and
to encourage outside intervention to remove

Whose Sarin?
the regime of Bashar al-Assad. By White Helmet’s own admission, it is well-resourced,
trained and funded by western NGOs and
governments, including USAID (US Agency
for International Development), which funded the group $23-million as of 2016.
A UK-based company with strong links
to the British Foreign Office, May Day Rescue, has largely managed the actual rescue
aspects of the White Helmet’s work. Drawing on a budget of tens of millions of dollars
donated by foreign governments, including
the US and UK, May Day Rescue oversees a
comprehensive training program designed
to bring graduates to the lowest standard –
“light,” or Level One – for Urban Search and
Rescue (USAR).
Personnel and units trained to the “light”
standard are able to conduct surface search
and rescue operations – they are neither
trained nor equipped to rescue entrapped
victims. Teams trained to this standard are
not qualified to perform operations in a hazardous environment (such as would exist in
the presence of a nerve agent such as Sarin).
The White Helmets have made their reputation through the dissemination of selfmade videos ostensibly showing them in
action inside Syria, rescuing civilians from
bombed-out structures, and providing lifesaving emergency medical care. (It should be
noted that the eponymously named Oscarnominated documentary showing the White
Helmets in action was filmed entirely by the
White Helmets themselves, which raises a
genuine question of journalistic ethics. To
the untrained eye, these videos are a dramatic representation of heroism in action. To
the trained professional (I can offer my own
experience as a Hazardous Materials Specialist with New York Task Force 2 USAR team),
these videos represent de facto evidence of
dangerous incompetence or, worse, fraud.
The bread and butter of the White Helmet’s self-made reputation is the rescue of a
victim – usually a small child – from beneath
a pile of rubble, usually heavy reinforced concrete. First and foremost, as a “light” USAR

team, the White Helmets are not trained or
equipped to conduct rescues of entrapped
victims. Yet the White Helmet videos depict
their rescue workers using excavation equipment and tools, such as pneumatic drills, to
gain access to victims supposedly pinned under the weight of a collapsed building.
The techniques used by the White Helmets are not only technically wrong, but
dangerous to anyone who might actually be
trapped – the introduction of excavators to
move debris, or the haphazard drilling and
hammering into concrete in the immediate
vicinity of a trapped victim, would invariably
lead to a shifting if the rubble pile, crushing
the trapped victim to death. In my opinion,
the videos are pure theatre, either staged to
impress an unwitting audience, or actually
conducted with total disregard for the wellbeing of any real victims.
Likewise, the rescue of victims from a hazardous materials incident, especially one as
dangerous as one involving a nerve agent as
lethal as Sarin, is solely the purview of personnel and teams specifically equipped and
trained for the task. “Light” USAR teams receive no hazardous materials training as part
of their certification, and there is no evidence
or even claim on the part of the White Helmets that they have undergone the kind of
specialist training needed to effect a rescue
in the case of an actual chemical weapons
attack.

The bread and
butter of the White
Helmet’s selfmade reputation
is the rescue of a
victim – usually a
small child – from
beneath a pile of
rubble, usually
heavy reinforced
concrete

Greater Harm
This reality comes through on the images
provided by the White Helmets of their actions in and around Khan Sheikhun on April
4. From the haphazard use of personal protective equipment (either nonexistent or
employed in a manner that negates protection from potential exposure) to the handling of victims and so-called decontamination efforts, everything the White Helmets
did was operationally wrong and would expose themselves and the victims they were
ostensibly treating to even greater harm.
As was the case with their “rescues” of
www.coldtype.net | August 2017 | ColdType

11

Whose Sarin?
We don’t see the
actual rescue at
the scene of the
event. What we get
is grand theatre
as bodies arrive at
the field hospital,
with lots of running
to and fro and
meaningless
activity that would
actually worsen
the condition
of the victims
and contaminate
the rescuers

victims in collapsed structures, I believe the
rescue efforts of the White Helmets at Khan
Sheikhun were a theatrical performance
designed to impress the ignorant and ill-informed.
I’m not saying that nothing happened
at Khan Sheikhun – obviously something
did. But the White Helmets exploited whatever occurred, over-dramatising “rescues”
and “decontamination” in staged theatrics
that were captured on film and rapidly disseminated using social media in a manner
designed to influence public opinion in the
West.
We don’t see the actual rescue at the
scene of the event – bodies pulled from their
homes, lying in the streets. What we get is
grand theatre as bodies arrive at the field
hospital, with lots of running to and fro and
meaningless activity that would actually
worsen the condition of the victims and contaminate the rescuers.
Through their actions, however, the
White Helmets were able to breathe life into
the overall narrative of a chemical weapons attack, distracting from the fact that no
actual weapon existed and thus furthering
the efficient cause by which the object – the
nonexistent chemical weapon – was created.
Having defined the creation of the object
(the nonexistent chemical weapon) and the
means by which it was created (the flawed
theatrics of the White Helmets), we move on
to the third, or formal cause, which constitutes the expression of what the object is. In
the case of Khan Sheikhun, this is best expressed by the results of forensic testing of
samples allegedly taken from victims of the
chemical attack, and from the scene of the
attack itself. The organisation responsible for
overseeing this forensic testing was the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical
Weapons, or OPCW.
Through its work, the OPCW has determined that the nerve agent Sarin, or a “Sarinlike substance,” was used at Khan Sheikhun,
a result that would seemingly compensate

12 ColdType | August 2017 | www.coldtype.net

for both the lack of a bomb and the amateurish theatrics of the rescuers.
The problem, however, is that the OPCW
is in no position to make that claim.
One of the essential aspects of the kind
of forensic investigation carried out by organisations such as the OPCW – namely the
application of scientific methods and techniques to the investigation of a crime – is the
concept of “chain of custody” of any samples
that are being evaluated.
This requires a seamless transition from
the collection of the samples in question,
the process of which must be recorded
and witnessed, the sealing of the samples,
the documentation of the samples, the escorted transportation of the samples to the
laboratory, the confirmation and breaking
of the seals under supervision, and the subsequent processing of the samples, all under supervision of the OPCW. Anything less
than this means the integrity of the sample
has been compromised – in short, there is
no sample.
The OPCW acknowledges that its personnel did not gain access to Khan Sheikhun at
any time. However, the investigating team
states that it used connections with “parties
with knowledge of and connections to the
area in question,” to gain access to samples
that were collected by “non-governmental
organisations (NGOs)” which also provided
representatives to be interviewed, and videos and images for the investigating team
to review. The NGO used by the OPCW was
none other than the White Helmets.
The process of taking samples from a contaminated area takes into consideration a
number of factors designed to help create as
broad and accurate a picture of the scene of
the incident itself as well as protect the safety
of the person taking the sample as well as the
integrity of the crime scene itself (ie, reduce
contamination).
There is no evidence that the White Helmets have received this kind of specialised
training required for the taking of such samples. Moreover, the White Helmets are not an

Whose Sarin?
extension of the OPCW – under no circumstances could any samples taken by White
Helmet personnel and subsequently turned
over to the OPCW be considered viable in
terms of chain of custody. This likewise holds
true for any biomedical samples evaluated
by the OPCW – all such samples were either
taken from victims who had been transported to Turkish hospitals, or provided by
non-OPCW personnel in violation of chain of
custody.
The dubious motive
Lastly, there is Aristotle’s final cause, which
represents the end for which the object is
– namely, what was the ultimate purpose of
the chemical weapons attack on Khan Sheikhun. To answer this question, one must remain consistent with the framework of examination of potential to actuality applied
herein. In this, we find a commonality between the four causes whose linkage cannot be ignored when assessing the truth of
what happened at Khan Sheikhun, namely
the presence of a single entity – the White
Helmets.
There are two distinct narratives at play
when it comes to what happened in Khan
Sheikhun. One, put forward by the governments of the United States, Great Britain,
France, and supported by the likes of Bellingcat and the White Helmets, is that the Syrian
government conducted a chemical weapons
attack using a single air-delivered bomb on a
civilian target.
The other, put forward by the governments of Russia and Syria, and sustained by
the reporting of Seymour Hersh, is that the
Syrian air force used conventional bombs to
strike a military target, inadvertently releasing a toxic cloud from substances stored at
that facility and killing or injuring civilians in
Khan Sheikhun.
There can be no doubt that the very
survival of the White Helmets as an organisation, and the cause they support
(ie, regime change in Syria), has been furthered by the narrative they have helped

craft and sell about the events of April 4
in and around Khan Sheikhun. This is the
living manifestation of Aristotle’s final
cause, the end for which this entire lie has
been constructed.
The lack of any meaningful fact-based
information to back up the claims of the
White Helmets and those who sustain
them, like the US government and Bellingcat, raises serious questions about the
viability of the White House’s latest pronouncements on Syria and allegations
that it was preparing for a second round of
chemical attacks.
If America has learned anything from its
painful history with Iraq and the false allegations of continued possession of weapons
of mass destruction on the part of the regime of Saddam Hussein, it is that to rush
into military conflict in the Middle East
based upon the unsustained allegations
of an interested regional party (ie, Ahmed
Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress) is
a fool’s errand.
It is up to the discerning public to determine which narrative about the events in
Syria today they will seek to embrace: one
supported by a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist who has made a career out
of exposing inconvenient truths, from My
Lai to Abu Ghraib and beyond, or one that
collapses under Aristotle’s development of
potentiality to actuality analysis, as the manufactured story line promoted by the White
Helmets demonstratively does.
CT

If America has
learned anything, it
is that to rush into
military conflict
in the Middle
East based upon
the unsustained
allegations of an
interested regional
party (ie, Ahmed
Chalabi and the
Iraqi National
Congress) is
a fool’s errand

Scott Ritter is an ex-Marine Corps intelligence
officer who served in the former Soviet Union
implementing arms control treaties, in the
Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm,
and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of
WMD. He is the author of Deal of the Century:
How Iran Blocked the West’s Road to War
(Clarity Press, 2017). This essay originally
appeared in The American Conservative
at http://www.theamericanconservative.com/
articles/ex-weapons-inspector-trumps-sarinclaims-built-on-lie
www.coldtype.net | August 2017 | ColdType

13

In The Picture

‘‘Rise, like lions

14 ColdType | August 2017 | www.coldtype.net

In The Picture

after slumber . . .
Photo: Ron Fassbender

https://www.flickr.com/people/theweeklybull/

Not One Day More: Thousands of activists take to the
streets in protest against UK Prime Minister Theresa
May and her Tory partyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s despised austerity policy.

www.coldtype.net | August 2017 | ColdType

15

In The Picture

Photo: Ron Fassbender

Shake your chains

KILL AUSTERITY: Banners show the anger being felt at the way Theresa May’s government is mismanaging the UK economy.

After the vote,
the rebellion
UK rejects Theresa May
and Tory party austerity
as marchers salute
prime minister-in-waiting
Jeremy Corbyn

16 ColdType | August 2017 | www.coldtype.net

L

abour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn told a massive anti-austerity
march in London on July 1 that he intends to force – and win
– another general election later this year. The march came just
weeks after the June general election in which Tory leader Theresa May saw an expected rout of Labour turn into a minority government shorn up by a hasty billion pound deal with Northern Ireland’s
Democratic Unionist Party.
The huge crowd assembled outside the headquarters of the BBC
– the state broadcaster criticised by many as being anti-Labour during the election – before heading to a rally in Parliament Square with
music and many speakers from other political parties and social
movements. Corbyn’s message to the crowd was: “We are the people, we are united and we are determined, we are not going to be divided or let austerity divide us. We are increasing in support and we
are determined to force another election as soon as we can.” CT

In The Picture

Photo: Gerry Popplestone

to earth like dew

KING Corbyn: Young marchers show their loyalty to the Labour Party leader â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and his people-before-profits anti-austerity programme.
www.coldtype.net | August 2017 | ColdType

17

In The Picture

Photo: Julian Stallabrass

Ye are many â&#x20AC;&#x201C; they

ANGRY WORDS: Marchers make it clear what they think of Theresa May and her government.

Ron Fassbender is a Londonbased photographer. His
Flickr feed is www.flickr.com/
theweeklybull/albums
Julian Stallabrass is a writer,
curator, photographer and
lecturer at the Courtauld
Institute of Art. His Flickr feed
is www.flickr.com/photos/
slowkodachrome
Gerry Popplestone is retired.
He learned photographer while
he was working in the Gambia.
His Flickr feed is www.flickr.
com/photos/gerrypops

18 ColdType | August 2017 | www.coldtype.net

Photo: Ron Fassbender

OUR photographers

In The Picture

Photo: Julian Stallabrass

Photo: Ron Fassbender

are few’’

Headline from The Masque of Anarchy, written
after the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester on
August 16, 1819, by poet Percy Bysshe Shelley

WE, THE PEOPLE: Jeremy Corbyn
(above, beard) walks with the crowd
before his speech at Parliment Square

www.coldtype.net | August 2017 | ColdType

19

Blinkered Inquiry

Covering fire
The public inquiry into London’s Grenfell Tower disaster will be a farce unless it
examines the long-running assault on public protections, writes George Monbiot

Even before the
public inquiry into
London’s Grenfell
Tower disaster
has begun, it looks
like a stitch-up,
its initial terms
of reference set
so narrowly that
government policy
remains outside
the frame

W

e don’t allow defendants in court
cases to select the charges on which
they will be tried. So why should
the government set the terms of
a public inquiry into its own failings? We
don’t allow criminal suspects to vet the trial
judge. Why should the government approve
the inquiry’s chair?
Even before the public inquiry into London’s Grenfell Tower disaster has begun, it
looks like a stitch-up, its initial terms of reference set so narrowly that government policy remains outside the frame. An inquiry
that honours the dead would investigate
the wider causes of this crime. It would examine a governing ideology that sees torching public protections as a sacred duty.
Let me give you an example. On the
morning of June 14, as the tower blazed, an
organisation called the Red Tape Initiative
convened for its pre-arranged discussion
about building regulations. One of its tasks
was to consider whether rules governing the
fire resistance of cladding materials should
be removed for the sake of construction industry profits.
Please bear with me while I explain what
this initiative is and who runs it, as it’s a
perfect cameo of British politics. It’s a government-backed body established “to grasp
the opportunities” Brexit offers to cut “red
tape:” a disparaging term for public protections. It’s chaired by the Conservative MP Sir

20 ColdType | August 2017 | www.coldtype.net

Oliver Letwin, who has claimed that “the
call to minimise risk is a call for a cowardly
society.” It is a forum in which exceedingly
wealthy people help decide which protections should be stripped away from lesser
beings.
Among the members of its advisory panel
are Charles Moore, who was formerly editor
of the Daily Telegraph and the chair of an
organisation called Policy Exchange. He was
also best man at Oliver Letwin’s wedding.
Sitting beside him is Archie Norman, former
chief executive of ASDA and the founder of
Policy Exchange (see above). He was once
Conservative MP for Tunbridge Wells. He
was succeeded in that seat by Greg Clark,
the minister who now provides government
support for the Red Tape Initiative.
Neoliberal lobby group
Until he became environment secretary
Michael Gove was also a member of the
Red Tape Initiative panel. Oh, and he was
appointed by Archie Norman as the first
chairman of Policy Exchange (he was replaced by Charles Moore). Policy Exchange
also supplied two of Oliver Letwin’s staff in
the Conservative policy unit he used to run.
So what is this Policy Exchange? It’s a neoliberal lobby group funded by dark money,
that seeks to tear down regulations.
The Red Tape Initiative’s management
board consists of Letwin, Baroness Rock and

Blinkered Inquiry
Lord Marland. Baroness Rock is a childhood
friend of former Chancellor George Osborne,
and married to the wealthy financier Caspar
Rock. Lord Marland is a multimillionaire
businessman who owns a house and four
flats in London, “various properties in Salisbury,” three apartments in France and two
apartments in Switzerland.
In other words, the Red Tape Initiative is
a representative cross-section of the British
public. In no sense is it a self-serving clique
of old chums, insulated from hazard by their
extreme wealth, whose role is to decide
whether other people (colloquially known
as “cowards”) should be exposed to risk.
Letwin’s Initiative appointed a panel to
investigate housing regulations. It includes
representatives of trade unions and NGOs,
though they’re outnumbered by executives
and lobbyists from the industry. And there,
surprise, surprise, is a man called Richard
Blakeway, from Policy Exchange.
Their task on June 14 was to consider a
report the Red Tape Initiative had commissioned, whose purpose was to identify building rules that could be cut. Among those it
listed as “burdensome” was the EU Construction Products Regulation, which seeks
to protect people from fire, and restricts the
kind of cladding that can be used.
What was the source of the report’s assertion that this regulation was unnecessary? A
column in the Sunday Telegraph by Christopher Booker. He has a fair claim to being
more wrong more often than any other British journalist – quite an achievement, given
the field. As the panel members watched
an ideology go up in flames, they decided
that on this occasion they would not recommend that the regulation be removed. But
the Red Tape Initiative, gruesome spectre
that it is, continues its work.
It is one of many such schemes set up
in recent decades, by both the Conservatives and New Labour. Among the recent
examples are David Cameron’s Star Chamber (yes, that really was the name he gave
it), in which ministers were interrogated

by a panel of corporate executives; and the
Cutting Red Tape programme, which boasts
that “businesses with good records have
had fire safety inspections reduced from
6 hours to 45 minutes.” One of the results
of this bonfire of regulation is the government’s repeal in 2012 of the fire prevention
measures in the London Building Act. Had
they remained in place, the Grenfell fire is
unlikely to have spread.

The central
purpose is not
just to empower
corporations
and the very
rich, but actively
to disempower
everyone else,
through austerity,
outsourcing and
privatisation

Good for rich, bad for rest
This assault on public protections is just
one element of the compound disaster neoliberalism – promoted by opaquely-funded
groups like Policy Exchange – has imposed
on Britain since 1979. Its central purpose is
not just to empower corporations and the
very rich, but actively to disempower everyone else, through austerity, outsourcing
and privatisation. An inquiry that failed to
investigate such causes would be a farce. It
would do nothing to prevent similar catastrophes from recurring. It would do nothing
to stop the rich from destroying other people’s protections, as the Red Tape Initiative
threatens to do.
But this is what we have been offered so
far by a government that can choose charges, judge and jury. There’s an urgent need
for an independent commission, whose
purpose is to decide when inquiries should
be called, what their terms should be, and
who should chair them. Governments
should have no influence over any of these
decisions.
On June 14, a facade caught fire, in more
senses than one. A blinkered inquiry threatens to clad the origins of this great crime,
shielding their embarrassing ugliness from
public view. We cannot and must not accept
it.
CT
George Monbiot’s latest book, How Did We
Get Into This Mess?, is published by Verso.
This article was first published in the
Guardian newspaper. Monbiot’s web site is
www.monbiot.com
www.coldtype.net | August 2017 | ColdType

21

Limiting Debate

The invisible empire
beneath the radar
As long as we debate and march for issues that do not challenge the ruling class,
power and wealth, nothing will ever really change, says Jason Hirthler

American author
Mark Twain
wasn’t fooled
by the jingoistic
broadsheets,
nor by the
administration’s
claims of support
for Cubans, nor
by its claims to
want to bring
democracy to
the Philippines,
a former
panish colony

W

hen the United States went to war
with Spain in 1898, it did so in a
media environment of “yellow
journalism,” that played no small
part in the advent of the Spanish-American
War. Yellow journalism was basically the use
of sensationalism and poorly researched
reportage to stir up excitement and pad
the bottom line. In February that year, the
mysterious sinking of the American cruiser
Maine on a quiet night in Havana harbour
was seized upon by western media outlets
such as William Randolph Hearst’s New
York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New
York World to create an atmosphere rife
with tension, accusation, and defamation.
War fever was loosed upon the population.
The McKinley administration was soon ensnared in combat, which it won in 10 weeks
across the Caribbean and Pacific theatres,
effectively erasing the Spanish imperial
footprint from the Philippines and Caribbean, and delivering American control over
Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.
American author Mark Twain wasn’t
fooled by the jingoistic broadsheets, nor by
the administration’s claims of support for
Cubans, nor by its claims to want to bring
democracy to the Philippines, a former
Spanish colony. Twain said, “…we have
gone there to conquer, not to redeem.”
It’s depressingly familiar to see the similarities between the scenario Twain and his

22 ColdType | August 2017 | www.coldtype.net

anti-imperialist colleagues faced off against
and the ones progressives face today. The
imperial machine marches on, subjugating
any nation that attempts any sort of freethinking alternative to indentured servitude
to the globalists. The tactics of the state and
machinations of the media are little different than they were in 1898: Both seek to
cloud imperial crimes behind a façade of
moral necessity.
To the modern ear, yellow journalism
sounds a lot like “fake news,” with its ceaseless reliance on anonymous sources, fake
experts, misleading interpretations, and
scare tactics. Yellow journalism and fake
news are both euphemisms for state propaganda, typically employed to mask the
machinery of empire. Whatever we name
it, state deceit is in any case slated to grow
more pervasive thanks to Barack Obama.
Obama, the vacuous charlatan who infested
the security state with his pro-war acolytes,
signed into law the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act (CDPA) as part of
the FY 2017 National Defense Authorization
Act (NDAA). This followed the 2013 NDAA
which permitted the State Department to
aim its public relations efforts directly at
the American people, something previously
illegal. Overt state propaganda is now legal on domestic turf, as if the state’s media
fronts weren’t already busily engaged creating domestic propaganda.

Limiting Debate
A jingoist media
drools for war.
Hearst had his
papers enjoining
readers to
“Remember the
Maine,” just as
the Washington
Post editorial
board did when it
claimed the Bush
administration’s
argument for war
with Iraq was
“Irrefutable”

After the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana harbour, US newspapers were quick to place responsibility for
the loss on Spain. The leading theory now is that a spontaneous coal bunker fire caused the disaster.

If the media that fronts for the imperial
state is much the same so, too, is the process
by which conflict unfolds. These steps are
designed to cast aggression as self-defence.
A false flag, or at least an uncertain event,
provides a pretext for media hyperbole and
state sabre-rattling. The Maine fiasco delivered the same pretext as the misattributed
chemical attacks did in Syria. A list of untenable demands ensures conflict. McKinley
demanding that Spain quit Cuba had the
same escalating effect as NATO’s demand in
the ’90s that Slobodan Milosevic permit it
to occupy Serbia.
A jingoist media drools for war. Hearst
had his papers enjoining readers to “Remember the Maine,” just as the Washington
Post editorial board did when it claimed the
Bush administration’s argument for war
with Iraq was “Irrefutable.” And, as always,
claims of noble aims ring forth from the
precincts of power. Washington was principally helping Cuba throw off the onerous
shackle of Spanish rule rather than protect
its sugar and tobacco interests, while NATO

is backing freedom fighting moderates in
Syria against an authoritarian regime rather
than seeking to replace Assad. Those that
oppose are, as Hermann Goering recommended, denounced for their lack of patriotism, as have been leftists who claim the
Syrian state is sovereign and should determine its own future.
We are in the same situation that Twain
was in largely because the elites own the
media that shape our understanding of the
world, an understanding that permits little if any genuine discussion of American
imperialism and its criminal destruction of
vulnerable peoples, communities, villages,
and families across the globe. The absence
of this information continues in no small
part because the general public remains
convinced we live in a society of wide-ranging debate in which no topics are off limits
in the great American marketplace of ideas.
The limits of debate
We do have lively debates, by design, and
only within acceptable limits. As Noam
www.coldtype.net | August 2017 | ColdType

23

Limiting Debate
The intelligence
community’s
supposedly
“damning” report
on Russian
hacking of the
election failed to
deliver technical
evidence of the
Russian state’s
role in the crime
and primarily
complained about
Russian media
coverage
of America

Chomsky said, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit
the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but
allow very lively debate within that spectrum.” Imperialism and its consequences –
economic, psychological, and physical violence – are largely off limits. We can discuss
racism against blacks in the police force, but
not racism as a feature of the imperial state.
We can discuss corruption on Wall Street,
but not finance as a critical tool of imperial
exploitation. We can discuss whether policing borders is racist, but not the role of immigration in creating reserve armies of labor for use by the ruling corporatocracy. We
can discuss gay rights and gender pay scales,
but not how imperialism destroys the lives
of countless women and gays in nations we
target. We can discuss the Syrian war, but
not Syria as a new chapter in imperialism’s
history of slaughter.
As long as we debate and march for issues
that do not challenge the ruling class power
and wealth, nothing structural will change.
Racism, bigotry, gender discrimination, financial exploitation of Main Street by Wall
Street, debt peonage, wage serfdom, foreign
wars of dubious provenance, the canonisation of war criminals past and present, and
much more will continue unabated.
Yet the media consistently denies us the
imperial context on issue after issue, which
leaves us arguing about our response to an
event that we misunderstand. We fail to see
the root causes of events, and therefore debate symptoms of imperialism, not the imperialist disease itself.
l Look at the recent Manchester attacks. The media – from the BBC to the
Washington Post – refused to deal with the
complexities of the collapse of the Libyan
state. They will note that in 2011 Libya suffered a “chaotic collapse.” They will mention that Muammar Gadhafi “was toppled
from power. They will decry its status as
“a failed state.” But they won’t situate that
war on the timeline of global imperialism,
which quite transparently marches on, top-

24 ColdType | August 2017 | www.coldtype.net

pling ‘despots’ and ‘dictators’ and installing
puppet regimes willing to facilitate western
exploitation of that particular nation’s resources, infrastructure, and national wealth.
The focus, most especially on the right, will
descend on Islam, which is radicalised and
thereby ‘weaponised’ by imperial brutality.
Each war is treated as a one-off, an isolated
incident that has its own unique motive
force. This is essentially the ‘rogue actor’ excuse writ large, an explanation that is often
used to shield corporations from institutional complicity in crimes.
l Look at liberal criticism of President
Donald Trump. The Washington Post gave
Trump four ‘Pinocchios’ for supposedly lying about NATO. He was first correctly accused of being incorrect for saying nations
owed money to the United States. NATO nations are current on their dues. He was then
accused of lying for saying NATO nations
weren’t spending enough on their own security. In fact, NATO members have until
2024 to up their spending to two percent
of GDP. Therefore, this statement was likewise deemed to be incorrect, even though
the article did not note the probable conflict between what Trump deemed to be
sufficient spending and what extant NATO
agreements thought sufficient. Nor was a
word spent illuminating Trump’s overarching criticism, that NATO was a defunct organisation that should have been dissolved
when the Warsaw Pact was dismantled at
the end of the Cold War. The paper never
noted that was, instead, expanded as a tool
of western aggression toward Russia in the
post-Gorbachev era. The paper failed to
note that Washington has increasingly used
NATO, and has consequently spent more
on NATO, as a Trojan horse by which it can
somewhat covertly expand Washington’s
imperialism to the East.
l Look at Russiagate. The probe. The investigation. The hearings. The intelligence
community’s supposedly “damning” report
on Russian hacking of the election failed
to deliver technical evidence of the Rus-

Limiting Debate
sian state’s role in the crime and primarily
complained about Russian media coverage
of America. The supposed consensus of
the 17 intelligence agencies is even a dubious claim. Look at the non-stop New York
Times coverage of the collusion allegations,
a sophomoric attempt to use standard business contacts, cocktail party conversations,
media appearance fees, and Twitter contacts to paint the Russian Federation as a
wanton imperial power. This baseless investigation steals precious column inches from
what could be discussions of the actual
empire and its heavy-handed military deployments abroad. Nor is it explained why
this fearmongering distraction exists in the
first place: because the freewheeling Trump
wanted to unwind President Obama’s witless aggressions against Russia, from sanctions to NATO to Syria to the election disinformation campaign. That would have
directly challenged the globalist strategy to
extend US hegemony worldwide.
l Look at the British parliamentary
elections. Jeremy Corbyn’s tattered, divided
Labour party clawed 32 seats away from the
centre-right, while Theresa May’s reactionary Conservative Party dropped 12 seats, losing its majority. This was considered by the
mainstream press to be a devastating turn of
events, mostly because it had comprehensively demonised Corbyn and his socialistleaning ideas. The day before the election,
the Daily Mail ran a front-page story calling
Corbyn a terrorist sympathiser. Context was
dutifully elided. It might have been mentioned that May’s own party comprehensively supported terror in Northern Ireland
in the 1980s, and the DUP party it has now
align with to form a majority was a major
supporter of anti-Catholic violence as well.
More to the point, May now supports a war
in Syria that a) represents a war of aggression by the West against a sovereign state
that has never invited it inside its borders;
and b) is the most transparent instance
yet of the dovetailing interests of terrorist
organisations and western governments,

namely that the former profitably serve
the latter as a lance or trident injecting the
triple evils of war, poverty, and racism into
the vortex of the post-colonial chaos that is
neo-imperialism.
l Look at the faux scope creep in Syria.
The so-called coalition of western states
plus terrorist factions shot down a Syrian jet that was supposedly bombing ISIS.
Washington said it bombed the Syrian
Democratic Forces (SDF). They are probably
one and the same, as the Russians seem to
think. In any case, the Wall Street Journal,
Washington Post, New York Times, and Financial Times all skipped the “inciting action” of the US attack on a Syrian jet, an
act of war in a nation into which the west’s
farcical coalition was never invited. These
White House flacks instantly published articles announcing that Russia would now
“target” and “threaten” US warplanes over
Syria. At once, the roles have been reversed
and the aggressor is acting in self-defence.
Ostensibly there to combat ISIS, something
the Russians and Syrians vehemently challenge, the US is really there to overthrow
Bashar Al Assad, balkanise Syria in sectarian statelets that Israel can control on our
behalf, and sever linkages between Iran and
Hezbollah, which will weaken resistance to
Tel Aviv’s conquest and settlement of all of
the West Bank. Not to mention moving toward its feverish vision of one day expanding its Jewish democracy from the Nile to
the Euphrates.
Topics aside, the question of empire is
rarely included, if ever. Not in a reporter’s
notes, not in a list of interview questions,
not in the video transcript, not in a first or
second or final draft.

Theresa May
now supports a
war in Syria that
represents a war
of aggression by
the West against
a sovereign state
that has never
invited it inside
its borders

Corruptions of protocol
We have two actions in particular to thank
for the whitewashing of imperialism in
modern times. One is the Clinton regime’s
popularisation of “humanitarian interventions” as a legitimate form of violent aggression in the Nineties. Generally, the UN
www.coldtype.net | August 2017 | ColdType

25

Limiting Debate
As George Orwell
said, “It is the
same in all wars;
the soldiers do
the fighting, the
journalists do
the shouting,
and no true
patriot ever gets
near a front-line
trench, except
on the briefest of
propaganda-tours”

Security Council is summoned to provide a
patina of legitimacy for such aggression. Simon Chesterton, in his book Just War or Just
Peace?, examines what he calls, “Security
Council activism, notable for the plasticity
of circumstances in which the Council was
prepared to assert its responsibility for international peace and security.” The related
“responsibility to protect” (R2P) was enshrined by UN members as a new international norm in 2005. Among its intellectual
underpinnings is the idea that sovereign
states are responsible for the safety of their
populations and if they fail to live up to that
responsibility, including violations of humanitarian law, it falls to the international
community to fulfill it.
Both concepts have been used to confuse
and co-opt progressive voters and move
them into a state of surrender in which they
acquiesce to our noble wars in whatever
form they materialise – by air, land, sea,
or proxy. Both concepts are founded on a
fair premise: the desire to protect the weak
against the strong. But, predictably, both
have been deliberately perverted into justifications for their antithesis: removing legal
protections for the weak against the aggression of the strong. A look at Libya, Iraq, Serbia, among other wars makes this plain.
Nature of the beast
But this is the brazen, crass, and intrepid
nature of imperialism. It wantonly employs
language to erect a curtain of rectitude behind which it prosecutes its vice. As Chesterton points out, the UNSC seems to harbour
little fear of invoking R2P for its own uses.
Likewise, Washington has no compunction
in leveraging the norms of R2P to unilateral-

ly take military action, as though one nation
among all has the moral fortitude to stride
into the breach and defend the undefended.
This has been necessary in Syria since Russia and China have got wise to Washington’s
intrigues. Perhaps they have finally learned
that the Bretton Woods institutions, as well
as the UN, are the legitimising instruments
of western hegemony. The “third world” understood this in the ’70s. These institutions
are the notary republics that give western
violence the stamp of authority.
Twain voiced a popular impulse when he
wrote that he was “opposed to having the
(American) eagle put its talons on any other land.” But his words were drowned out by
imperialists then, and today the globalists
and their press flacks continue to refashion
the notion of “just war” in fresh raiment
to bamboozle a new generation of citizenreaders, and lead them hollering and cheering into the breech. As George Orwell said,
“It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do
the fighting, the journalists do the shouting,
and no true patriot ever gets near a frontline trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours.” As long as the yellow press
at the Times and Post continues to peddle
the narrative of America above all, right or
wrong, the march of imperial slaughter will
never abate. That tale and its glib raconteurs
have to be comprehensively discredited if
resistance to empire is ever going to achieve
critical mass.
CT
Jason Hirthler is a veteran of the
communications industry and author of
The Sins of Empire: Unmasking American
Imperialism. He lives in New York City and
can be reached at jasonhirthler@gmail.com

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26 ColdType | August 2017 | www.coldtype.net

Referendum Costs

The branding agency
that delivered Brexit
How did the UK’s pro-Brexit campaigns use the same obscure branding agency,
if their campaigns weren’t coordinated? ask Peter Geoghegan & Adam Ramsay

W

e didn’t expect to end up in a suburban street in the town of Ely.
But then, we didn’t expect to find
a Saudi prince or a Danish ‘private banker’ embroiled in the Democratic
Unionist Party’s (DUP) Brexit dark money.
We didn’t expect a connection with a Bengali gun-running incident. Or that the Tories
would end up relying on the DUP to secure a
wobbly majority. So a quiet corner of Cambridgeshire was hardly the biggest shock.
We went to Ely to find out more about
Brexit, and how it was bankrolled. You see,
each of the different campaigns to leave the
EU was meant to be a separate organisation.
You can’t simply set up a new front every
time your current one is approaching its
spending limit. And we know they are all
different. The two main ones – Vote Leave
and Leave.EU – had a massive fight that was
reported all over the media. And the DUP
has been very clear with us that there was
no co-ordination between their campaign
and the others.
But what’s also true is that all these different campaigns used the same obscure
branding agency. Over the course of the final
few weeks of the referendum, the Electoral
Commission Website tells us, Arron Banks’
Leave.EU, the official Vote Leave campaign,
Grassroots Out, Ukip and the Democratic
Unionist Party collectively spent more than
£800,000 with Soopa Doopa, a branding

agency based, you guessed it, in the tiny
Cambridgeshire city of Ely.
As part of their Brexit campaign, the DUP
spent almost £100,000 with Soopa Doopa,
buying 15,000 Corex Boards, 5,000 bags,
100,000 window stickers, 7,000 t-shirts and
50,000 badges. On BBC Northern Ireland,
the Stephen Nolan Show recently asked its
listeners if they had seen any of the DUP
branded Brexit material. Our organisation,
openDemocracy, did spot some of this, but
not in Northern Ireland – in Edinburgh.
Meanwhile, Leave.EU spent £20,652.25
with Soopa Doopa, Grassroots Out £42,000,
Ukip £18,000, and Vote Leave £637,108.80.
In the whole of 2014-15, Soopa Doopa had a
turnover of just three-quarters of a million
pounds.

Over the final
few weeks of the
referendum, Arron
Banks’ Leave.EU,
the official Vote
Leave campaign,
Grassroots Out,
Ukip and the
Democratic
Unionist Party
collectively
spent more than
£800,000 with
Soopa Doopa

Same obscure agency
It’s been revealed before – partly by us,
(see The Dark Money That Paid For Brexit,
ColdType issue 135 – Pages 16 to 19), and
partly by the excellent Carole Cadwalladr
at the Observer newspaper – that the various different Brexit campaigns all used the
same obscure data analytics company: the
Canadian firm Aggregate IQ. The campaigns
dismissed this as coincidence. DUP’s campaign manager, Jeffrey Donaldson, told us
he ‘couldn’t remember’ how he heard of
them, despite spending more than £32,000
with the company.
www.coldtype.net | August 2017 | ColdType

27

Referendum Costs
Photo: Adam Ramsay

This small terraced
house in Ely is the
listed address for
the Soopa Doopa
agency.

So we decided to head to Ely, to find out
what attracted the different Brexit campaigns to Soopa Doopa. First, we went to
the address listed for the firm on the Companies House website – and that turned
out to be a chartered accountants, who
confirmed that they were registered there.
Then, we popped down to another address
that’s listed in public documents as theirs. It
was a house in the centre of town, between
a Chinese and an Indian take-away. Someone drew the curtains when we knocked.
Finally, we went to the current address listed
on both their website and with the Electoral
Commission.
It was on the edge of town, at the end of
a terrace row, and it appeared to be empty.
Nevertheless, Soopa Doopa Branding Ltd

28 ColdType | August 2017 | www.coldtype.net

does exist. The company advertises itself as
“specialists in the supply and manufacture
of branded promotional products,” and its
website advertises a whole range of products that you can get your logo on, through
them.
When we rang the number on the site
to ask if we could buy a DUP Leave campaign branded mug, the firm’s owner, Jake
Scott-Paul, answered the phone. Scott-Paul
seemed rather surprised when asked if this
was Soopa Doopa branding, but confirmed
that it was, and explained that the company
itself doesn’t print things, but rather organises for their printing. And so they wouldn’t
have a mug themselves: they don’t handle
the actual products. He also confirmed that
they had worked for the various Brexit campaigns, though claimed that “they were all
one campaign.” When we asked him to clarify what he meant by that, he hung up.
“Everything you need to know is in the
public domain. Those organisations came
to us during the referendum and we supplied merchandise to them. That’s all I have
to say really,” Soopa Doopa told us when we
called back a few weeks later.
Soopa Doopa was founded in 2012, and
according to the website Sourcing City
News, it won two major awards at the East
Cambridgeshire Business Awards last year.
As the website says: “The judges recognised the substantial growth achieved by
the company, made up of just two directors,
Jake Scott-Paul and Gavin Lambert, along
with one part time member of staff having
grown from a turnover of £750,000 in 20142105 to a massive £2.1-million in 2015-2016.”
Nevertheless, Soopa Doopa is not on the
British Promotional Merchandise Association’s list of distributors.
Jake Scott-Paul has been public about
his support for Brexit, and among his 142
Twitter followers are senior members of the
Leave movement including Arron Banks
and Andy Wigmore. During the campaign,
Soopa Doopa’s account retweeted prominent Leave supporters, including newly pro-

Referendum Costs
moted Brexit minister Steve Baker, showing
their merchandise.
There is no suggestion that the firm did
anything wrong in working for the various different leave campaigns. But what is
worth asking is this: how did all of the different Leave campaigns stumble upon the
same obscure branding agency in Ely?
Under UK electoral rules, campaigners
are not allowed to agree to work together
unless part of a joint campaign. But the
rules are less than clear cut. Discussions
with other campaigners that do not involve
decision making or coordinating your plans
are OK, but agreeing which areas or voters
to target is not. What you definitely cannot
do is agree how to co-ordinate your spending with another campaigner.
“Using the same supplier for goods or
services does not necessarily mean ‘working together’ is taking place. Working together is taken to be occurring when two
or more campaigners have a common plan
or arrangement,” the Electoral Commission
said.
In public, Vote Leave and Leave.EU were
frequently at loggerheads, often accusing
one another of undermining the Brexit
cause. But the pattern of spending by the rival Brexit camps displays a marked level of

similarity, with both camps spending millions of pounds with the same firms, some
of whom – like Aggregate IQ and Soopa
Doopa – are hardly household names.
Of course, one possible explanation
might have been that these firms pitched
their services to the campaigns, rather than
the other way around. So we rang Soopa
Doopa again to ask them how they got all
this business, and they were clear that this
isn’t what happened. As they said, before
hanging up again: “Everything you need
to know is in the public domain. Those organisations came to us during the referendum and we supplied merchandise to them.
That’s all I have to say really.”
Over a year on from the Brexit result, serious questions are still being raised about
referendum campaign spending. Perhaps
it’s time the different Brexit campaigns explained how they spent their money, and
where it all came from?
CT

The pattern of
spending by the
rival Brexit camps
displays a marked
level of similarity,
with both camps
spending millions
of pounds with
the same firms

Peter Geoghegan is an Irish writer and
journalist based in Glasgow. His books include
A Difficult Difference: Race, Religion and
the ‘new’ Northern Ireland. Adam Ramsay
is co-editor of openDemocracyUK and also
works with Bright Green. This essay was first
published at www.opendemocracy.net

The Best of Frontline
Read the best stories
from the magazine
that helped
change the face of
apartheid
South Africa at . . .
www.coldtype.net/frontline.html

www.coldtype.net | August 2017 | ColdType

29

Cash Grab

The pill game
Marshall Allen shows how two cheap over-the-counter medications
were transformed into one $455-million speciality pill

Vimovo was
created using
two readily and
cheaply available
generic, or over-thecounter, medicines:
naproxen, also
known by the
brand Aleve, and
esomeprazole
magnesium, also
known as Nexium

E

verything happened so fast as I walked
out of the doctor’s exam room. I was
tucking in my shirt and wondering if I’d
asked all my questions about my injured
shoulder when one of the doctor’s assistants
handed me two small boxes of pills.
“These will hold you over until your prescription arrives in the mail,” she said, pointing to the drug samples.
Strange, I thought to myself, the doctor
didn’t mention giving me any drugs. I must
have looked puzzled because she tried to reassure me.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “It won’t cost you
any more than $10.”
I was glad whatever was coming wouldn’t
break my budget, but I didn’t understand
why I needed the drugs in the first place.
And why wasn’t I picking them up at my local drugstore?
At first I shrugged it off. This had been my
first visit with an orthopedic specialist and he,
Dr Mohnish Ramani, hadn’t been the chatty
type. He’d barely said a word as he examined
me, tugging my arm this way and bending it
that way before rotating it behind my back.
The pain made me squirm and yelp, but he
knew what he was doing. He promptly diagnosed me with frozen shoulder, a debilitating inflammation of the shoulder capsule.
But back to the drugs. As an investigative
reporter who has covered health care for
more than a decade, the interaction was just

30 ColdType | August 2017 | www.coldtype.net

the sort of thing to pique my interest. One
thing I’ve learned is that almost nothing in
medicine – especially brand-name drugs – is
ever really a deal. When I got home, I looked
up the drug: Vimovo.
The drug has been controversial, to say the
least. Vimovo was created using two readily
and cheaply available generic, or over-thecounter, medicines: naproxen, also known
by the brand Aleve, and esomeprazole magnesium, also known as Nexium. The Aleve
handles your pain and the Nexium helps
with the upset stomach that’s sometimes
caused by the pain reliever. The key selling
point of this new “convenience drug?” It’s
easier to take one pill than two.
But only a minority of patients get an upset stomach, and there was no indication I’d
be one of them. Did I even need the Nexium
component?
Steep mark-up
I also did the math. You can walk into your
local drugstore and buy a month’s supply
of Aleve and Nexium for about $40. For
Vimovo, the pharmacy billed my insurance company $3,252. This doesn’t mean
the drug company ultimately gets paid that
much. The pharmaceutical world is rife
with rebates and side deals – all designed to
elbow ahead of the competition. But apparently the price of convenience comes at a
steep mark-up.

Cash Grab
Think about it another way. Let’s say you
want to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich every day for a month. You could buy
a big jar of peanut butter and a jar of grape
jelly for less than 10 bucks. Or you could buy
some of that stuff where they combine the
peanut butter and grape jelly into the same
jar. Smucker’s makes it. It’s called Goober.
Except in this scenario, instead of its usual
$3.50 price tag, Smucker’s is charging $565
for the jar of Goober.
So if Vimovo is the Goober of drugs, then
why have Americans been spending so
much on it? My insurance company, smartly,
rejected the pharmacy’s claim. But I knew
Vimovo’s makers weren’t wooing doctors
like mine for nothing. So I looked up the annual reports for the Ireland-based company,
Horizon Pharma, which makes Vimovo.
Since 2014, Vimovo’s net sales have been
more than $455-million. That means a lot
of insurers are paying way more than they
should for their Goober.
And Vimovo wasn’t Horizon’s only
such drug. It has brought in an additional
$465-million in net sales from Duexis, a similar convenience drug that combines ibuprofen and famotidine, aka Advil and Pepcid.
This year I have been documenting the
kind of waste in the health care system that’s
not typically tracked. Americans pay more
for health care than anyone else in the world,
and experts estimate that the US system
wastes hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
In recent months I’ve looked at what hospitals throw away and how nursing homes
flush or toss out hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of usable medicine every year. We
all pay for this waste, through lower wages
and higher premiums, deductibles and outof-pocket costs. There doesn’t seem to be
an end in sight – I just got a notice that my
premiums may be increasing by another 12
percent next year.
With Vimovo, it seemed I stumbled on another waste stream: overpriced drugs whose
actual costs are hidden from doctors and patients. In the case of Horizon, the brazenness

of its approach was even more astounding
because it had previously been called out in
media reports and in a 2016 congressional
hearing on out-of-control drug prices.
Gouging insurance companies?
“It’s a scam,” said Devon Herrick, a health
care economist with the National Center for
Policy Analysis. “It is just a way to gouge insurance companies or employer health care
plans.”
Unsurprisingly, Horizon says the high
price is justified. In fact, the drug maker
wrote in an email, “The price of Vimovo is
based on the value it brings to patients.”
Thousands of patients die and suffer injuries every year, the company said, because
of gastric complications from naproxen and
other nonsteroid anti-inflammatory drugs
(NSAIDs). Providing pain relief and stomach
protection in a single pill makes it more likely patients will be protected from complications, it said.
And Horizon stressed Vimovo is a “special
formulation” of Aleve and Nexium, so it’s
not the same as taking the two separately.
But several experts said that’s a scientific distinction that doesn’t make a therapeutic difference. “I would take the two medications
from the drugstore in a heartbeat – therapeutically it makes sense,” said Michael Fossler, a
pharmacist and clinical pharmacologist who
is chair of the public-policy committee for
the American College of Clinical Pharmacology. “What you’re paying for with [Vimovo]
is the convenience. But it does seem awful
pricey for that.”
Public outrage is boiling over when it
comes to high drug prices, leading the media and lawmakers to scold pharmaceutical
companies. You’d think a regulator would
monitor this, but the Food and Drug Administration told me they are only authorised
to review new drugs for safety and effectiveness, not prices. “Prices are set by manufacturers and distributors,” the FDA said in a
statement.
Horizon acquired Vimovo in November

Americans pay
more for health care
than anyone else
in the world, and
experts estimate
that the US system
wastes hundreds
of billions of dollars
a year

www.coldtype.net | August 2017 | ColdType

31

Cash Grab
My doctor said
he leaves billing
to his staff and
doesn’t even
know how much
he gets paid
for a lot of the
procedures he
performs, let alone
how much insurers
are being charged
for drugs

2013 from the global pharmaceutical giant
AstraZeneca. Horizon knew it faced challenges trying to get top dollar for inexpensive
ingredients. “Use of these therapies separately in generic form may be cheaper,” it said in
its 2013 report to investors. But the company
executed a shrewd strategy to give everyone
– insurers, patients, doctors and pharmacies
– the incentive to use Vimovo. It’s instructive
to review its playbook.
To get Vimovo covered, Horizon made
deals with insurance payers and pharmacy
benefit managers – the intermediaries who
help determine which drugs get reimbursed.
The contracts generally included special rebates and even administrative fees for these
intermediaries, the Horizon reports said, so
the drug maker got paid much less than the
sticker price, though it wouldn’t say how
much. But the company’s net sales show the
deals worked.
Horizon put boots on the ground to get
the prescriptions rolling, expanding its sales
force by the hundreds and focusing its marketing and sales efforts on doctors who already liked to prescribe brand-name drugs.
The company’s message to doctors emphasised the convenience of prescribing the two
ingredients in a single pill and that the single pill protected patients by making it more
likely they would take their medication as
directed.
Horizon also primed the medical community by giving donations totalling $101,000 to
the American Gastroenterology Association,
a speciality nonprofit for physicians. Some
doctors refuse drug-industry money, if only
to at least avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. ProPublica has done loads of
stories showing why doctors taking money
is indeed problematic, including one about
drug makers’ influence on physician speciality groups. When I went on the American
Gastroenterology Association’s website, the
first thing I saw was a pop-up ad from a drug
company. Several of the association’s board
members have received drug-company money, too. Horizon has made clear in its annual

32 ColdType | August 2017 | www.coldtype.net

reports that donations to the group “help
physicians and patients better understand
and manage” the risks of pain relievers causing gastric problems.
Horizon also zeroed in on patients’ worries about drug costs. To encourage them to
fill their prescriptions, Horizon covered all
or most of their out-of-pocket costs. That’s
why my doctor’s office could promise me I
wouldn’t spend too much for my Vimovo.
The programme, Horizon told investors in
reports, addressed the impact of pharmacies
switching to less expensive alternatives and
could “mitigate” the effect of payers searching for cheaper alternatives.
The strategy worked on me. I didn’t even
know why I was getting the prescription, but
when they told me it wouldn’t cost more
than I would spend on lunch with a friend,
I gave it the OK. A pharmacy I’d never heard
of sent me a bottle of Vimovo for $10, even
though my insurance company rejected the
claim.
Disturbing cost
Turns out paying the patient’s costs motivated my doctor, too. I waited until the end
of my next visit to bring up Vimovo, and
then we had a follow-up conversation on
the phone. Ramani didn’t know the price
of the drug and found it “disturbing” when
I told him. That was a surprise to me, but
not to him. He said he leaves billing to his
staff and doesn’t even know how much he
gets paid for a lot of the procedures he performs, let alone how much insurers are being charged for drugs. The marketing arms
of companies like Horizon must count on
this sort of blindness.
Ramani doesn’t receive money or gifts
from Horizon. (I confirmed this on Pro
Publica’s Dollars for Docs website, which lists
drug-company payments.) He said he likes
Vimovo because Horizon covers the patient’s
out-of-pocket costs, entirely in many cases.
Prescribing the generics or over-the-counter
medications separately would actually cost
more, he said. Which, of course, is exactly the

Cash Grab
company’s plan. But Ramani agreed that the
high cost of the drug to insurers ultimately
raises overall health care costs for all Americans.
Knowing Vimovo’s price, I asked him if he
would continue to prescribe it. “It changes
my thought process,” he said. “But at the end
of the day, I have to think about the patient
and whether the patient will be able to pay
out of pocket or not.”
Ramani said the Horizon drug rep told
him Vimovo prescriptions had to go through
a particular pharmacy for the patient to receive financial assistance. In its 2016 annual
report, Horizon wrote that prescriptions
for its drugs might not be filled by certain
pharmacies because of insurance-company
exclusions, co-payment requirements, or
incentives to use lower-priced alternatives.
So that’s why they didn’t give me the option
of picking up my pills at my neighbourhood
drugstore.
Instead, my Vimovo was mailed to me
from White Oak Pharmacy in Nutley, New
Jersey, which is about 45 minutes from my
house. I drove there to find out why. The
neighbourhood pharmacy is on the bottom
floor of a two-story brick building on a street
corner, next to a hair salon.
Vishal Chhabria, the pharmacist who
owns White Oak, told me the drug company sets the price of Vimovo. He insisted his
pharmacy has no special relationship or contract with Horizon. Maybe the drug company
steers prescriptions his way, he said, because
his pharmacy will process the coupons that
reduce or eliminate the patient costs, which
some pharmacies don’t. He said there is no
approved generic alternative to Vimovo, so
he can’t suggest one to patients. And while
other drugs, like over-the-counter medications, would be cheaper for the health system overall, they are more expensive for the
individual patient, he said.
In poring through Horizon’s financial filings, it appears the drug’s run may be ending. Horizon said in its report for the first
quarter of 2017 that fewer insurance compa-

nies have been willing to cover Vimovo and
many that do have demanded larger rebates.
As a result, Horizon has been eating more of
the costs of providing the drug to patients, as
they must have in my case. The prescriptions
have still been coming in, but net sales were
just under $5-million in the first quarter of
this year, down 81 percent from the first
quarter of 2016.
Critics of Vimovo say that’s still more than
patients should be spending on the drug. “That
number should be zero,” said Linda Cahn, an
attorney who advises corporations, unions
and other payers to help reduce their costs. “If
you want to talk about waste, that’s waste.”
Herrick, the health care economist, said
Horizon cashed in by eliminating many of
the barriers in the system that are meant to
control costs. The company got patients on
board by covering their out-of-pocket costs.
It appealed to doctors by promoting the
benefits to patients. And it did an end-run
around chain pharmacies, which typically
might suggest a lower-priced alternative, by
steering prescriptions to pharmacists who
would participate in their patient-assistance
program.
“Somebody brainstormed: ‘How can we
nullify any consumer check and balance in
this supply chain? What can we do to keep
the customer from asking questions?’” Herrick said.
The scheme that played out with Vimovo
is bound to happen again, Herrick said. Maybe it already is. Drug companies are always
on the lookout to deploy similar strategies.
I dutifully took my Vimovo for several days,
until I noticed it kept me awake until three
in the morning – a rare side effect. (Perhaps
they need to add a third drug to the combo.)
I probably have more than 50 pills left in the
bottle on my bedside table. Maybe I could
sell it back to Horizon for $1,500.
CT

I dutifully took my
Vimovo for several
days, until I noticed
it kept me awake
until three in the
morning – a rare
side effect. (Perhaps
they need to add
a third drug to the
combo)

Marshall Allen is a ProPublica reporter
covering health care and patient safety issues.
This story was originally published at
www.propublica.org
www.coldtype.net | August 2017 | ColdType

33

A Luta Continua

Why Palestine
is still the issue
John Pilger reports on a nation’s years-long battle against violent occupation,
racial discrimination, and abusive propaganda

What enrages those
who colonise and
occupy, steal and
oppress, vandalise
and defile is the
victims’ refusal to
comply. And this
is the tribute we
all should pay the
Palestinians.
They refuse to
comply. They go on.
They wait – until
they fight again

W

hen I first went to Palestine as
a young reporter in the 1960s, I
stayed on a kibbutz. The people I
met were hard-working, spirited
and called themselves socialists. I liked them.
One evening at dinner, I asked about the silhouettes of people in the far distance, beyond
our perimeter.
“Arabs”, they said, “nomads.” The words
were almost spat out. Israel, they said, meaning Palestine, had been mostly wasteland and
one of the great feats of the Zionist enterprise
was to turn the desert green.
They gave as an example their crop of Jaffa
oranges, which was exported to the rest of the
world. What a triumph against the odds of nature and humanity’s neglect.
It was the first lie. Most of the orange
groves and vineyards belonged to Palestinians
who had been tilling the soil and exporting
oranges and grapes to Europe since the 18thcentury. The former Palestinian town of Jaffa
was known by its previous inhabitants as “the
place of sad oranges.”
On the kibbutz, the word “Palestinian” was
never used. Why?, I asked. The answer was a
troubled silence.
All over the colonised world, the true sovereignty of indigenous people is feared by
those who can never quite cover the fact, and
the crime, that they live on stolen land.
Denying people’s humanity is the next
step – as the Jewish people know only too

34 ColdType | August 2017 | www.coldtype.net

well. Defiling people’s dignity and culture and
pride follows as logically as violence.
In Ramallah, following an invasion of the
West Bank by the late Ariel Sharon in 2002,
I walked through streets of crushed cars and
demolished houses, to the Palestinian Cultural Centre. Until that morning, Israeli soldiers
had camped there. I was met by the centre’s
director, the novelist, Liana Badr, whose original manuscripts lay scattered and torn across
the floor. The hard-drive containing her fiction, and a library of plays and poetry had
been taken by Israeli soldiers. Almost everything was smashed, and defiled.
Not a single book survived with all its pages; not a single master tape from one of the
best collections of Palestinian cinema.
The soldiers had urinated and defecated
on the floors, on desks, on embroideries and
works of art. They had smeared faeces on children’s paintings and written – in shit – “Born
to kill.” Liana Badr had tears in her eyes, but
she was unbowed. She said, “We will make it
right again.”
Victims refuse to comply
What enrages those who colonise and occupy, steal and oppress, vandalise and defile
is the victims’ refusal to comply. And this is
the tribute we all should pay the Palestinians. They refuse to comply. They go on.
They wait – until they fight again. And they
do so even when those governing them col-

A Luta Continua
laborate with their oppressors.
In the midst of the 2014 Israeli bombardment of Gaza, the Palestinian journalist Mohammed Omer never stopped reporting. He
and his family were stricken; he queued for
food and water and carried it through the
rubble. When I phoned him, I could hear the
bombs outside his door. He refused to comply.
Mohammed’s reports, illustrated by his
graphic photographs, were a model of professional journalism that shamed the compliant and craven reporting of the so-called
mainstream in Britain and the United States.
The BBC notion of objectivity – amplifying
the myths and lies of authority, a practice of
which it is proud – is shamed every day by the
likes of Mohamed Omer.
For more than 40 years, I have recorded
the refusal of the people of Palestine to comply with their oppressors: Israel, the United
States, Britain, the European Union.
Since 2008, Britain alone has granted licences for export to Israel of arms and missiles, drones and sniper rifles, worth £434-million.
Those who have stood up to this, without
weapons, those who have refused to comply,
are among Palestinians I have been privileged
to know:
l My friend, the late Mohammed Jarella,
who toiled for the United Nations agency UNRWA, in 1967 showed me a Palestinian refugee
camp for the first time. It was a bitter winter’s
day and schoolchildren shook with the cold.
“One day . . . ” he would say. “One day . . . ”
l Mustafa Barghouti, whose eloquence
remains undimmed, who described the tolerance that existed in Palestine among Jews,
Muslims and Christians until, as he told me,
“the Zionists wanted a state at the expense of
the Palestinians.”
l Dr Mona El-Farra, a physician in Gaza,
whose passion was raising money for plastic
surgery for children disfigured by Israeli bullets and shrapnel. Her hospital was flattened
by Israeli bombs in 2014.
l Dr Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist, whose

clinics for children in Gaza – children sent almost mad by Israeli violence – were oases of
civilization.
l Fatima and Nasser are a couple whose
home stood in a village near Jerusalem designated “Zone A and B,” meaning that the
land was declared for Jews only. Their parents
had lived there; their grandparents had lived
there. Today, the bulldozers are laying roads
for Jews only, protected by laws for Jews only.
It was past midnight when Fatima went
into labour with their second child. The baby
was premature; and when they arrived at
a checkpoint with the hospital in view, the
young Israeli soldier said they needed another document.
Fatima was bleeding badly. The soldier
laughed and imitated her moans and told
them, “Go home.” The baby was born there
in a truck. It was blue with cold and soon,
without care, died from exposure. The baby’s
name was Sultan.
For Palestinians, these will be familiar stories. The question is: why are they not familiar in London and Washington, Brussels and
Sydney?
In Syria, a recent liberal cause – a George
Clooney cause – is bankrolled handsomely
in Britain and the United States, even though
the beneficiaries, the so-called rebels, are
dominated by jihadist fanatics, the product of
the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and the
destruction of modern Libya.

When the United
Nations suddenly
stirs and defines
Israel as an
apartheid state,
as it did this year,
there is outrage
– not against
a state whose
“core purpose” is
racism, but against
a UN commission
that dared break
the silence

Unrecognised occupation
And yet, the longest occupation and resistance in modern times is not recognised.
When the United Nations suddenly stirs
and defines Israel as an apartheid state, as it
did this year, there is outrage – not against
a state whose “core purpose” is racism but
against a UN commission that dared break
the silence.
“Palestine,” said Nelson Mandela, “is the
greatest moral issue of our time.”
Why is this truth suppressed, day after day,
month after month, year after year?
In Israel – the apartheid state, guilty of a
www.coldtype.net | August 2017 | ColdType

35

A Luta Continua
There is no conflict,
no two narratives,
with their moral
fulcrum. There is a
military occupation
enforced by a
nuclear-armed
power backed by
the greatest military
power on earth;
and there is an
epic injustice

crime against humanity and of more international law-breaking than any other – the
silence persists among those who know and
whose job it is to keep the record straight.
In Israel, so much journalism is intimidated
and controlled by a groupthink that demands
silence on Palestine while honourable journalism has become dissidence: a metaphoric
underground.
A single word – “conflict” – enables this
silence. “The Arab-Israeli conflict,” intone the
robots at their teleprompters. When a veteran
BBC reporter, a man who knows the truth, refers to “two narratives,” the moral contortion
is complete.
There is no conflict, no two narratives,
with their moral fulcrum. There is a military
occupation enforced by a nuclear-armed
power backed by the greatest military power
on earth; and there is an epic injustice.
The word “occupation” may be banned,
deleted from the dictionary. But the memory
of historical truth cannot be banned: of the
systemic expulsion of Palestinians from their
homeland. “Plan D” the Israelis called it in
1948.
The Israeli historian Benny Morris describes how David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first
prime minister, was asked by one of his generals: “What shall we do with the Arabs?”
The prime minister, wrote Morris, “made a
dismissive, energetic gesture with his hand”.
“Expel them!” he said.
Seventy years later, this crime is suppressed
in the intellectual and political culture of the
West. Or it is debatable, or merely controversial. Highly-paid journalists eagerly accept
Israeli government trips, hospitality and flattery, then are truculent in their protestations
of independence. The term, “useful idiots,”
was coined for them.
In 2011, I was struck by the ease with
which one of Britain’s most acclaimed novelists, Ian McEwan, a man bathed in the glow
of bourgeois enlightenment, accepted the Jerusalem Prize for literature in the apartheid
state.
Would McEwan have gone to Sun City in

36 ColdType | August 2017 | www.coldtype.net

apartheid South Africa? They gave prizes
there, too, all expenses paid. McEwan justified his action with weasel words about the
independence of “civil society.”
Propaganda – of the kind McEwan delivered, with its token slap on the wrists for his
delighted hosts – is a weapon for the oppressors of Palestine. Like sugar, it insinuates almost everything today.
Understanding propaganda
Understanding and deconstructing state
and cultural propaganda is our most critical task. We are being frog-marched into a
second cold war, whose eventual aim is to
subdue and balkanise Russia and intimidate
China.
When Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin
spoke privately for more than two hours at
the G20 meeting in Hamburg, apparently
about the need not to go to war with each
other, the most vociferous objectors were
those who have commandeered liberalism,
such as the Zionist political writers of the
Guardian.
“No wonder Putin was smiling in Hamburg,” wrote Jonathan Freedland. “He knows
he has succeeded in his chief objective: he has
made America weak again.” Cue the hissing
for Evil Vlad.
These propagandists have never known
war but they love the imperial game of war.
What Ian McEwan calls “civil society” has
become a rich source of related propaganda.
Take a term often used by the guardians of
civil society – “human rights.” Like another
noble concept, “democracy,” “human rights”
has been all but emptied of its meaning and
purpose.
Like “peace process” and “road map,” human rights in Palestine have been hijacked
by Western governments and the corporate
NGOs they fund and which claim a quixotic
moral authority. So when Israel is called upon
by governments and NGOs to “respect human rights” in Palestine, nothing happens,
because they all know there is nothing to fear;
nothing will change.

A Luta Continua
Mark the silence of the European Union,
which accommodates Israel while refusing to
maintain its commitments to the people of
Gaza – such as keeping the lifeline of the Rafah border crossing open: a measure it agreed
to as part of its role in the cessation of fighting
in 2014. A seaport for Gaza – agreed by Brussels in 2014 – has been abandoned.
The UN commission I have referred to – its
full name is the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia – described Israel as,
and I quote, “designed for the core purpose”
of racial discrimination. Millions understand
this. What the governments in London, Washington, Brussels and Tel Aviv cannot control is
that humanity at street level is changing perhaps as never before.
More aware
People everywhere are stirring and are more
aware, in my view, than ever before. Some
are already in open revolt. The atrocity of
Grenfell Tower in London has brought communities together in a vibrant almost national resistance.
Thanks to a people’s campaign, the judiciary is today examining the evidence of a
possible prosecution of former British prime
minister Tony Blair for war crimes. Even if this
fails, it is a crucial development, dismantling
yet another barrier between the public and
its recognition of the voracious nature of the
crimes of state power – the systemic disregard
for humanity perpetrated in Iraq, in Grenfell
Tower, in Palestine. Those are the dots waiting
to be joined.
For most of the 21st-century, the fraud of
corporate power posing as democracy has
depended on the propaganda of distraction:
largely on a cult of “me-ism” designed to disorientate our sense of looking out for others, of
acting together, of social justice and internationalism.
Class, gender and race were wrenched
apart. The personal became the political and
the media the message. The promotion of
bourgeois privilege was presented as “progressive” politics. It wasn’t. It never is. It is the

promotion of privilege, and power.
Among young people, internationalism
has found a vast new audience. Look at the
support for Jeremy Corbyn and the reception
the G20 circus in Hamburg received. By understanding the truth and imperatives of internationalism, and rejecting colonialism, we
understand the struggle of Palestine.
Mandela put it this way: “We know only
too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
At the heart of the Middle East is the historic injustice in Palestine. Until that is resolved, and Palestinians have their freedom
and homeland, and Israelis are Palestinians
equality before the law, there will be no peace
in the region, or perhaps anywhere.
What Mandela was saying is that freedom
itself is precarious while powerful governments can deny justice to others, terrorise
others, imprison and kill others, in our name.
Israel certainly understands the threat that
one day it might have to be normal.
That is why its ambassador to Britain is
Mark Regev, well known to journalists as
a professional propagandist, and why the
“huge bluff” of charges of anti-Semitism, as
Ilan Pappe called it, was allowed to contort
the Labour Party and undermine Jeremy
Corbyn as leader. The point is, it did not succeed.
Events are moving quickly now. The remarkable Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions campaign (BDS) is succeeding, day by
day; cities and towns, trade unions and student bodies are endorsing it. The British government’s attempt to restrict local councils
from enforcing BDS has failed in the courts.
These are not straws in the wind. When the
Palestinians rise again, as they will, they may
not succeed at first – but they will eventually
if we understand that they are us, and we are
them.
CT
This is an abridged version of John Pilger’s
address to the Palestinian Expo 2017 in London.
His film, Palestine Is Still the Issue, can be
viewed at www.johnpilger.com

By understanding
the truth and
imperatives of
internationalism,
and rejecting
colonialism, we
understand the
struggle of Palestine

www.coldtype.net | August 2017 | ColdType

37

Self-Delusion

Israel’s ever-more
sadistic reprisals
Jonathan Cook tells how harsh government actions enhance a sense of
victimhood while avoiding reality that country is a brutal colonial occupier state

Israel has
taken collective
punishment
– a serious violation
of international law
– to new extremes,
stretching the notion
to realms once
imaginable only in a
dystopian fable like
George Orwell’s 1984

W

hen Israel passed a new counterterrorism law last year, Ayman
Odeh, a leader of the country’s
large minority of Palestinian citizens, described its draconian measures
as colonialism’s “last gasp.” He said: “I
see . . . the panic of the French at the end of
the occupation of Algeria.”
The panic and cruelty plumbed new
depths last month, when Israeli officials
launched a $2.3-million lawsuit against the
family of Fadi Qanbar, who crashed a truck
into soldiers in Jerusalem in January, killing
four. He was shot dead at the scene.
The suit demands that his widow, Tahani,
reimburse the state for the compensation it
awarded the soldiers’ families. If she cannot
raise the astronomic sum, the debt will pass
to her four children, the oldest of whom is
currently only seven.
Israel is reported to be preparing many
similar cases.
Like other families of Palestinians who
commit attacks, the Qanbars are homeless,
after Israel sealed their East Jerusalem home
with cement. Twelve relatives were also
stripped of their residency papers as a prelude to expelling them to the West Bank.
None has done anything wrong – their
crime is simply to be related to someone Israel defines as a “terrorist.”
This trend is intensifying. Israel has demanded that the Palestinian Authority stop

38 ColdType | August 2017 | www.coldtype.net

paying a small monthly stipend to families
like the Qanbars, whose breadwinner was
killed or jailed. Conviction rates among
Palestinians in Israel’s military legal system
stand at more than 99 per cent, and hundreds of prisoners are incarcerated without
charge.
Israeli legislation is set to seize $280-million – a sum equivalent to the total stipends
– from taxes Israel collects on behalf of the
Palestinian Authority, potentially bankrupting it.
Israel loyalists will soon introduce in the
US Senate a bill to similarly deny the PA
aid unless it stops “funding terror.” Issa Karaka, a Palestinian official, said it would be
impossible for the PA to comply: “Almost
every other household . . . is the family of a
prisoner or martyr.”
Israel has taken collective punishment
– a serious violation of international law –
to new extremes, stretching the notion to
realms once imaginable only in a dystopian
fable like George Orwell’s 1984.
Israel argues that a potential attacker
can only be dissuaded by knowing his loved
ones will suffer harsh retribution. Or put
another way, Israel is prepared to use any
means to crush the motivation of Palestinians to resist its brutal, five-decade occupation.
All evidence, however, indicates that
when people reach breaking-point, and are

Self-Delusion
willing to die in the fight against their oppressors, they give little thought to the consequences for their families. That was the
conclusion of an investigation by the Israeli
army more than a decade ago.
In truth, Israel knows its policy is futile. It
is not deterring attacks, but instead engaging in complex displacement activity. Evermore sadistic forms of revenge shore up a
collective and historic sense of Jewish victimhood while deflecting Israelis’ attention
from the reality that their country is a brutal
colonial settler state.
If that verdict seems harsh, consider a
newly published study into the effects on
operators of using drones to carry out extrajudicial executions, in which civilians are
often killed as “collateral damage.”
A US survey found pilots who remotely
fly drones soon develop symptoms of posttraumatic stress from inflicting so much
death and destruction. The Israeli army
replicated the study after its pilots operated
drones over Gaza during Israel’s 2014 attack
– the ultimate act of collective punishment.
Some 500 Palestinian children were killed
as the tiny enclave was bombarded for nearly two months.
Doctors were surprised, however, that
the pilots showed no signs of depression or
anxiety. The researchers speculate that Israeli pilots may feel more justified in their
actions, because they are closer to Gaza
than US pilots are to Afghanistan, Iraq or
Yemen. They are more confident that they
are the ones under threat, even as they rain

down death unseen on Palestinians.
The determination to maintain this exclusive self-image as the victim leads to outrageous double standards.
Last month, the Israeli supreme court
backed the refusal by officials to seal up the
homes of three Jews who kidnapped Mohammed Abu Khdeir, a 16-year-old from
Jerusalem, in 2014 and burnt him alive.
In May, the Israeli government revealed
that it had denied compensation to six-yearold Ahmed Dawabsheh, the badly scarred,
sole survivor of an arson attack by Jewish
extremists that killed his entire family two
years ago.
Human rights group B’Tselem recently
warned that Israel has given itself immunity
from paying compensation to all Palestinians under occupation killed or disabled by
the Israeli army – even in cases of criminal
wrongdoing.
This endless heaping of insult upon injury for Palestinians is possible only because
the west has indulged Israel’s wallowing in
victimhood so long. It is time to prick this
bubble of self-delusion and remind Israel
that it, not the Palestinians, is the oppressor.
CT

It is time
to prick this bubble
of self-delusion
and remind
Israel that it, not
the Palestinians,
is the oppressor

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn
Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books
are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq,
Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East
(Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine:
Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed
Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net

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www.coldtype.net | August 2017 | ColdType

39

Just Imagine

If the US had killed
the ISIS leader!
Neil Clark wonders if he’s living in a bizarre and one-dimensional world

We still don’t have
physical evidence
that the ISIS head
honcho was killed
in a Russian
airstrike, but
we never actually
saw physical
evidence of Osama
bin Laden’s death,
either

H

ow would Western media have responded if it was reported that it was
‘highly likely’ that US air strikes had
killed the head of ISIS? We’d have
been told, of course, how it proved that the
US was the ‘greatest nation on earth.’ We’d
also be reminded how grateful we should
be that America – aka ‘The World’s Policeman’ – always went after – and got – ‘the
bad guys.’ Then there would be those ‘We
Came, We Saw, He Died’ type of comments
from leading US politicians. Donald Trump
would be boasting about the killing for the
rest of his life.
Al-Baghdadi vs. Osama bin Laden
– spot the difference
But Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of ISIS,
was reportedly killed by Russian airstrikes,
not US ones, so there hasn’t been much fuss
made. In fact, many leading pundits and
commentators didn’t even bother to tweet
the news. It’s revealing to compare the lowkey coverage of the al-Baghdadi story to the
great fanfare that greeted the news that Osama bin Laden had reportedly been killed
by US Navy SEALs in Pakistan in 2011. Then,
large crowds – waving the stars-and-stripes
– gathered in Times Square and other US
cities to celebrate. Former President George
W. Bush hailed a “momentous achievement.” NATO Secretary Rasmussen lauded a
“significant success.” The media was equal-

40 ColdType | August 2017 | www.coldtype.net

ly euphoric. Got Him! Vengeance At Last
– US Nails The Bastard, was the splash on
the New York Post. ‘Justice Has Been Done
– Us Forces Kill Bin Laden,’ announced the
Washington Post. ‘Rot In Hell’! Osama Bin
Laden Killed In Secret Attack By Us Forces,’
exclaimed the Toronto Sun.
The headlines surrounding the killing
of the head of ISIS, by contrast, have been
rather more muted – and skeptical. “Russia claims to have killed ISIS leader,” said
Newsweek. “Little proof to back Russian
claims they killed al-Baghdadi in air-strike,”
declared the Toronto Sun. “White House
casts doubt on Russia’s claims it killed ISIS
leader,” reported Politico in an article that
– surprise, surprise – made it straight to alBaghdadi’s Wikipedia page.
Although it’s true that we still don’t have
physical evidence that the ISIS head honcho was killed in a Russian airstrike, it’s
worth pointing out that we never actually
saw physical evidence of Osama bin Laden’s
death, either.
But it was the US government that
claimed to have killed him, so skepticism
did not feature in the newspaper headlines.
In fact, any doubting of the official narrative
in 2011 would have seen you dismissed as a
crazy conspiracy theorist. If Uncle Sam says
something is true, well, we are all expected
to believe it. It’s all very different though if
someone else claims to have killed the ‘bad

Just Imagine
guy’ – particularly if the country in question
is an ‘Official Enemy.’ Russia killing the head
of ISIS doesn’t fit the State Departmentfriendly narrative. So let’s either rubbish it
or ignore it.
No need to hurry Theresa – we’re on your side!
Just imagine . . . if Labour had been the
largest party in the House of Commons following the UK election on June 8, but was
nine seats short of a majority. And that
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn had then
spent over two weeks trying to do a deal
with the Irish Republican party Sinn Fein
– who traditionally don’t take their seats
in Westminster – to enable him to form a
government. We can be sure that the pressure from the Establishment on Corbyn to
step aside and let Tory leader Theresa May
try to form a government would have been
unrelenting. Elite pundits would be on TV
24/7 telling us that Corbyn attempts to
form ‘a coalition of chaos’ was endangering our democracy.
But it’s Theresa May who spent more
than two weeks desperately trying to get
an agreement with a Northern Irish political party (the DUP), and there was no great
pressure on her to ‘get a move on.’ More a
case of ’Take your time, Theresa; whenever
you’re ready.’ The Establishment is not always this indulgent of prime ministers trying to hang on to power following a loss of
seats in a general election. When Labour
Prime Minister Gordon Brown lost his majority in the 2010 general election, he was
told in no uncertain terms that he had to
step down with immediate effect ‘for the
good of the country.’
“In the space of five tumultuous days,
Britain has gone from democracy as we
know it to the brink of dictatorship,” declared an editorial in the Sun newspaper, as
the ‘squatter’ Gordon Brown hung on. Other
commentators accused Brown of trying to
carry out a ‘coup.’
While it’s true that Brown polled a significantly lower share of the vote to May

COALITION OF CONVENIENCE: Arlene Foster of Northern Ireland‘s DUP with her
new best friend, British Prime Minister Theresa May. Photo: Number 10 / Flickr

(29 percent to 42.3 percent) they were both
prime ministers who lost their majority, but
who still, post-election, had the chance of
staying on if they were able to pull off deals
with other parties. But their treatment was
very different. As Corbyn’s would have been
– and indeed will be – if he finds himself in
the same position as May next time.
‘Target states bring terrorism upon themselves’
Just imagine . . . if there had been deadly
ISIS attacks on Capitol Hill and the Lincoln
Memorial in Washington, killing 13, and the
Iranian president had issued a statement
in response that declared, “we underscore
that states that sponsor terrorism risk falling victim to the evil they promote . . .”
Elite newspapers would, I’m sure, be full
of ‘outraged’ op-eds saying that the comments showed the ‘moral depravity of the
Iranian regime.’ Yet President Trump published those comments following ISIS attacks on the Tehran parliament and the
tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini and no one
in the mainstream seemed particularly

Iran has been
fighting ISIS
terrorism in Syria.
But, of course, we
can’t really big that
up, can we, as it
goes against the
neocon narrative
of Iran being “the
world’s number
one sponsor of
terrorism”

www.coldtype.net | August 2017 | ColdType

41

Just Imagine
Corbyn achieved
his party’s success
without resorting
to angry lefty
ranting. His focus
was on kindness,
compassion,
sharing, inclusivity
and forgiveness.
This approach held
up a crystal-clear
mirror to the ugly,
self-interested
cynicism of the
Tory party

Neil Clark is a
journalist, writer,
broadcaster and
blogger. He is a
regular pundit on RT
and has also
appeared on BBC TV
and radio, Sky News,
Press TV and the
Voice of Russia.
He is the co-founder
of the Campaign For
Public Ownership @
PublicOwnership.
His award winning
blog can be found
at www.neilclark66.
blogspot.com

outraged – not even professional Trumpbashers.
What made his comments even more
shocking is that Iran has been fighting
ISIS terrorism in Syria. But, of course, we
can’t really big that up, can we, as it goes
against the neocon narrative of Iran being
“the world’s number one sponsor of terrorism.”
‘Target states’ like Iran can never be the
innocent, undeserving victims of terrorist
attacks, even when they clearly are. It’s also
worth remembering that when the US was
hit by the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the Iranian
leadership strongly condemned the act
of terrorism and candlelight vigils for the
victims were held throughout the country.
There was no talk of the US falling victim to
an ‘evil’ that they had ‘promoted.’
US shooting down YOUR planes inside YOUR
own country is self-defense!
Just imagine . . . if the Syrian government
and its allies had spent the past six years
funding, backing and training anti-government radical Islamist ‘rebels’ in the US Then
the Syrian Air Force had started bombing
the US and unilaterally declared its own ‘DeConfliction Zones’ on American territory to
protect its ‘assets’ on the ground. After this,
a US fighter jet that was attacking what the
US government called ‘terrorists’ in Texas
was shot down by the Syrian forces. Would
the action be called ‘self-defence’?
And if the US and its allies then said
they would treat Syrian jets bombing the
US as potential targets – would they be cast
as the aggressors? I think not. But if we reverse the two countries this is exactly what
the US has been doing in Syria. They’re illegally bombing a sovereign state, but then
say they’re acting in ’self-defense’ when that
country’s military takes action over its own

territory. The imperial arrogance is off the
scale, but we’re meant not to notice.
Don’t mention who’s arming the war!
(if the ‘good guys’ are responsible)
Just imagine . . . if ‘the world’s worst cholera outbreak’ had broken out in a country
which a close Russian ally had been bombing back to the Stone Age for over two years?
And that the close Russian ally had been
armed, trained and given logistical support
by Russia. Don’t you think the Kremlin involvement would have been mentioned in
this report here?
But Yemen has, since 2015, been under
assault from a Saudi-led coalition, which
has been given every kind of assistance by
the UK and US And, because ‘we’ in the west
are always ‘the good guys,’ our responsibility for the human catastrophe in Yemen
can’t be mentioned, in the same way as the
UK/US role in transforming Libya into a terrorist-ridden failed state is also taboo.
Strange silence of the anti-censorship brigade
Just imagine . . . if Russia, or Iran, gave the
tiny country of Qatar a 10-day ultimatum
to agree to 13 demands that included taking the international broadcaster Al Jazeera
off air and Qatar changing its foreign policy.
That’s after Russia or Iran had imposed and
got others to agree to a diplomatic and trading embargo on Qatar. We can be sure that
this obnoxious, bullying behaviour would
have made headlines around the world,
leading to widespread condemnation as
well as calls for military action against Moscow or Tehran. But it’s that very close Western ally Saudi Arabia giving the ultimatum
to Qatar, so there’s silence. Let’s keep shtum
about the ’threats to media freedom,’ and
carry on tweeting our attacks on RT, shall
we?
CT

The next ColdType, issue 145
will be on line in mid-September 2017
42 ColdType | August 2017 | www.coldtype.net

Canada’s contribution
to a holocaust
Canada’s 150th anniversary offered a unique opportunity to shed light
on one of the darker corners of Canadian history, writes Yves Engler

Seeing an
opportunity to
add to his colony,
Leopold wanted
Stanley to take a
circuitous route all
the way around
South Africa, up the
Congo River and
across the interior
of the continent

I

n a bid to extract rubber and other commodities from his personal colony, Belgian
King Léopold II instituted a brutal system
of forced labour in the late 1800s. Individuals and communities were given rubber
collection quotas that were both hard to fulfill and punishable by death. To prove they
killed someone who failed to fulfill a quota
soldiers from the Force Publique, the colonial police, they were required to provide a
severed hand. With Force Publique officers
paid partly based on the number collected,
severed hands became a sort of currency in
the colony and baskets of hands the symbol
of the Congo Free State.
Between 1891 and 1908 millions died from
violence, as well as the starvation and disease,
caused by Leopold II’s terror. A quarter of the
population may have died during Leopold’s
reign, which sparked a significant international solidarity movement that forced the
Belgian government to buy the colony.
William Grant Stairs, from Halifax, Nova
Scotia, played an important part in two expeditions that expanded Leopold II’s immensely profitable Congolese venture. The Royal
Military College of Canada-trained soldier was
one of 10 white officers in the first-ever European expedition to cross the interior of the
continent. Subsequently Stairs led an expedition that added 150,000 square kilometres to
Leopold’s colony.
In 1887, Stairs joined the Emin Pasha Relief

44 ColdType | August 2017 | www.coldtype.net

Expedition, which was ostensibly designed
to ‘rescue’ the British-backed governor of
Equatoria, the southern part of today’s South
Sudan. Scottish merchant William MacKinnon asked famed American ‘explorer’ Henry
Morton Stanley to lead a relief effort. At the
time of the expedition, Léopold II employed
Stanley, who had been helping the king carve
out the Congo Free State. Seeing an opportunity to add to his colony, Leopold wanted
Stanley to take a circuitous route all the way
around South Africa, up the Congo River and
across the interior of the continent.
One of ten whites, Stairs quickly became
second-in-command of the three-year expedition. Read from a humanistic or internationalist perspective, the RMC graduate’s diary of the disastrous expedition is incredibly
damning. Or, as Canadian parliamentary poet
laureate George Elliott Clarke put it, “Stairs’
account of his atrocities establishes that even
Canadians, blinded by racism, can become
swashbuckling mass murderers.”
Stairs’ diary, which he asked to be published upon his and Stanley’s death, makes
it clear that locals regularly opposed the mission. One passage notes, “The natives made a
tremendous noise all night and canoes came
close to us, the natives yelling frantically for
us to go away,” while another entry explains,
“The natives destroyed their food rather than
let it fall into the hands of the invaders.”
Stairs repeatedly admits to “ransacking the

History Lesson
place.” A December 11, 1887, diary entry notes:
“Out again at the natives, burned more houses and cut down more bananas; this time we
went further up the valley and devastated the
country there. In the afternoon [white officer,
A. J. Mounteney] Jephson and I went up to
some high hills at the back of the camp and
burnt all we could see, driving off a lot of natives like so much game. I managed to capture some six goats and yesterday I also got
six, which we gave to the men. The natives
now must be pretty sick of having their property destroyed in the way we are doing, but it
serves them right as they were the aggressors
and after taking our cloth, fired on us.”
On a number of occasions the expedition
displayed mutilated bodies or severed heads
as a “warning” to the locals. Stairs notes, “I often wonder what English people would say if
they knew of the way in which we go for these
natives; friendship we don’t want as then we
should get very little meat and probably have
to pay for the bananas. Every male native capable of using the bow is shot. This, of course,
we must do. All the children and women are
taken as slaves by our men to do work in the
camps.”
Stairs led numerous raiding parties to
gather “carriers,” which were slaves in all but
name. According to The Last Expedition, “[the
mission] routinely captured natives, either to
be ransomed for food, to get information, or
simply to be used as guides for a few days.”
To cross the continent the expedition relied
on its superior firepower, which included the
new 600-bullet-per-minute Maxim gun. Stairs
describes one battle, stating that his men were
“ready to land and my Maxim ready to murder them if they should dare to attack us.” On
another day, the firearm aficionado explained,
“I cleaned the Maxim gun up thoroughly and
fired some 20 or 30 rounds at some howling natives on the opposite bank.” Twenty
months into the mission Stairs admits “by
what means have we travelled over 730 miles
of country from the Congo to the lake? Why
by rifle alone, by shooting and pillaging.”
Beyond the immediate death and destruc-

tion, the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition opened
new areas of the African interior to Arab slave
traders, and it is thought to be the source of
a sleeping sickness epidemic that ravaged the
region. The expedition was also devastating
for its participants. With little food and much
abuse from the white officers, only 253 of the
695 African porters and soldiers who started
the mission survived. Additionally, hundreds
of other Africans who became part of the expedition at later stages died as well.
There are disturbing claims that some white
officers took sex slaves and in one alarming
instance even paid to have an 11-year-old girl
cooked and eaten. This story scandalised the
British public. For his part, Stairs became almost pathologically inhumane. His September 28, 1887, diary entry notes, “It was most
interesting, lying in the bush and watching the
natives quietly at their days work; some women were pounding the bark of trees preparatory to making the coarse native cloth used all
along this part of the river, others were making
banana flower by pounding up dried bananas,
men we could see building huts and engaged
at other such work, boys and girls running
about, singing, crying, others playing on a
small instrument common all over Africa, a
series of wooden strips, bent over a bridge and
twanged with the thumb and forefinger. All
was as it was every day until our discharge of
bullets, when the usual uproar of screaming of
women took place.”
Even with some criticising the expedition
in Britain, Stairs’ efforts were celebrated in
Canada. An honouring committee established
by the mayor of Halifax decided to give him
a sword made in London of Nova Scotia steel
and the city organized a reception attended by
the Lieutenant-Governor with a military band
playing “Here the Conquering Hero Comes.”
Within two years of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition Stairs helped King Leopold II
conquer the resource-rich Katanga region of
the Congo. Suggested to Leopold by British investors and having already impressed Stanley
with his brutality, Stairs headed up a heavily
armed mission that swelled to 2,000.

Twenty months
into the mission,
Stairs admits
“by what means
have we travelled
over 730 miles
of country from
the Congo to the
lake? Why by rifle
alone, by shooting
and pillaging”

www.coldtype.net | August 2017 | ColdType

45

History Lesson
“Only rarely do
the natives think
of improving their
lot – that’s the great
weakness among
the Africans. Their
fathers’ ways are
theirs and their
own customs will be
those of their sons
and grandsons,”
writes Stairs

The goal of the expedition was to extend
Leopold’s authority over the Katanga region
and to get a piece of the copper, ivory and
gold trade. Stairs’ specific objective was to get
Msiri, the ruler of the region, “to submit to the
authorities of the Congo Free State, either by
persuasion or by force.” In his diary, Stairs says
more or less as much, writing that his goals
were “above all, to be successful with regard
to Msiri … to discover mines in Katanga that
can be exploited … to make some useful geographic discoveries.”
As leader of the mission, Stairs prepared a
daily journal for the Compagnie du Katanga. It
details the terrain, resources and inhabitants
along the way as well as other information
that could assist in exploiting the region. It
also explains his personal motivations for taking on the task despite spotty health. “I wasn’t
happy [garrisoned with the Royal Engineers in
England] in the real sense of the word. I felt my
life passing without my doing anything worthwhile. Now I am freely making my way over
the coastal plain with more than 300 men under my orders. My least word is law and I am
truly the master.” Later, he describes his growing force and power. “I have thus, under my
orders, 1,350 men – quite a little army.”
Stairs admitted to using slaves even though
Leopold’s mission to the Congo was justified
as a humanistic endeavour to stop the Arab
slave trade. He wrote about how “the antislavery society will try and jump upon me for
employing slaves as they seem to think I am
doing . . . however, I don’t fancy these will disturb me to a great extent.” The RMC graduate
also regularly severed hands and reportedly
collected the head of an enemy.
The expedition accomplished its principal
objective. Stairs had Msiri killed and threatened Msiri’s brothers with the same fate unless they accepted Leopold as sovereign. After
securing their submission, Stairs divided the
kingdom between Msiri’s adopted son and
brothers.
Stairs used a series of racist rationalisations
to justify conquering Katanga. He describes
the population as “unfortunate blacks who,

46 ColdType | August 2017 | www.coldtype.net

very often, are incapable of managing their
own affairs,” and asked in the introduction of
his diary, “Have we the right to take possession
of this vast country, take it out of the hands
of its local chiefs and to make it serve the realization of our goals? . . . To this question, I
shall reply positively, yes. What value would it
have [the land he was trying to conquer] in the
hands of blacks, who, in their natural state, are
far more cruel to one another than the worst
Arabs or the wickedest whites.”
At another point, Stairs cites another standard colonial justification: “Only rarely do the
natives think of improving their lot – that’s
the great weakness among the Africans. Their
fathers’ ways are theirs and their own customs
will be those of their sons and grandsons.”
While Stairs died in the Congo, his exploits
were lauded in Ottawa when Senator W.J.
Macdonald sought to move “a parliamentary
resolution expressing satisfaction for Stairs’
manly conduct.” There’s a Stairs Street in Halifax and two brass plaques honour him at the
Royal Military College (one for Stairs alone
and another dedicated to him and two others). The main plaque reads: “William Grant
Stairs, Captain the Welsh Regiment. Born at
Halifax Nova Scotia 1 July, 1863. Lieutenant
Royal Engineers 1885-91. Served on the staff
of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition 1887 under the leadership of H.M. Stanley and exhibited great courage and devotion to duty. Died
of fever on the 9 June 1892 at Chinde on the
Zambesi whilst in command of the Katanga
Expedition sent out by the King of the Belgians.” Another plaque was erected for Stairs
(and two others) at St. George Cathedral in
Kingston, Ontario. And a few hundred kilometers to the southwest, “Stair’s Island” was
named in his honour in Parry Sound.
Stairs was one of hundreds of Canadians
who helped conquer different parts of Africa
at the turn of the 20th century. Accounts of
Canada’s first 150-years are incomplete without this chapter in our history.
CT

Yves Engler is a Montreal-based activist and
author. His web site is www.yvesengler.com

Insights
ColdType

Celebrating the birth
of Britain’s NHS

Kit Knightly celebrates the anniversary of the greatest
social achievement in British political history
Photo: Wikimedia

“No society can legitimately call itself
civilised if a sick person is denied aid
because of lack of means.” – Aneurin
(Nye) Bevan, father of Britain’s
National Health Service.

J

uly 5 was the 69th anniversary of “The Appointed Day.”
On that day in 1948, Britain’s
Labour Party government under Prime Minister Clement Attlee,
launched its revolutionary National
Health Service. In the 69 years since
then, though regularly undermined
and underfunded by Tory and New
Labour governments, the NHS has
saved millions of lives and provided
vital support for injured, disabled
and chronically ill people who – in
any other era of human civilisation
– would have been forced to live in
ruin or die in the gutter.
The importance of this achievement cannot be understated. Built
out of a bombed-out and shellshocked nation after the World
War II, in what Winston Churchill
referred to as “a bankrupt nation,”
where food rationing would continue until 1952, it was the product
of the altruism that so often sweeps
through a population in the wake

Aneurin (Nye) Bevan, a former miner,
led the fight to introduce Britain’s National
Health Service.
Photo: Wikimedia

of calamity and suffering.
It’s easy to look back with hindsight and see the creation of the
NHS as somehow inevitable, such is
the temptation with history. Obviously it was always going to happen
. . . because it did.
After all, we’re not talking about
extreme far-left ultra-statism, but
rather common sense and sympathy. By removing the profit motive
you reduce costs, and the money
can be found by increasing the top
rate of tax on the very wealthy.
Thus, society as a whole benefits.
But the birth of the NHS was not
easy, resisted by the bureaucratic
establishment, and a strong propa-

ganda campaign set on frightening
the public via comparison to the
recently defeated enemy: Nazi Germany.
It met fierce resistance from the
British Medical Association (BMA)
and the Conservative Party, which
voted against the bill 21 times before
it was passed. Polls were published
claiming that 90 percent of doctors
opposed the new system, with one
former BMA chairman describing
the NHS proposal in 1946, “I have
examined the bill and it looks to me
uncommonly like the first step, and
a big one, to national socialism as
practised in Germany. The medical
service there was early put under
the dictatorship of a ‘medical führer.’ The bill will establish the minister for health in that capacity.”
The driving force behind the
NHS, Aneurin Bevan MP – a former
miner and trade union official – had
to fight tooth and nail to get the bill
passed. He described the fight thus,
in a speech made on “The Appointed Day,” July 5th 1948: “During the
last six months to a year there has
been a sustained propaganda in the
newspapers supporting the party
opposite, which has resulted in
grave misrepresentation of the nature of the Health Service and of the
conditions under which the medical profession are asked to enter the
Health Service.
“There has been even worse
misrepresentation, sustained by a
campaign of personal abuse, from a
small body of spokesmen who have
consistently misled the great pro-

www.coldtype.net | August 2017 | ColdType

47

Insights
The resistance which Bevan faced
– both media-based and political –
has not gone away; indeed it has
only got stronger. The public mind
has been poisoned against the very
idea of socialist policies. Large parts
of the Western world think fight between free market capitalism and
socialism is over, believing Margaret Thatcher’s assertion that “There
is no alternative.”
The NHS stands as a reminder
that this is not true. The popularity of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn,
and the simple common sense of
the most left-wing Labour manifesto in decades, will bring the “socialism scare tactics” back to the front
pages of newspapers and websites
all over the UK and the world.
We should remember, amid all
the negativity that will flow, that
the NHS still stands, and still works
– a perfect silent riposte to those
who seek to undermine the idea of
socialist infrastructure out of selfishness and greed.
CT
Kit Knightly is an editor at
www.offguardian.com

My advice to Amazon’s
Bezos: Pay some tax
Edward J. Zelinsky has a simple suggestion for
the billionaire businessmen and his contemporaries

J

eff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon, has asked on
Twitter for advice about the use
of his fortune for philanthropy.
My advice is that Mr. Bezos should
pay some tax.

48 ColdType | August 2017 | www.coldtype.net

Contemporary attention to philanthropy is largely attributable to
the admirable work of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, Jr. Through their
efforts, The Giving Pledge, Buffett
and Gates have commendably en-

Photo: Wikimedia

fession to which they are supposed
to belong.
“From the very beginning, this
small body of politically poisoned
people have decided to fight the
Health Act itself and to stir up as
much emotion as they can in the
profession.”
Today, the NHS is under the
greatest threat it has faced since its
inception.
In America, millions of people
suffer, die or are rendered bankrupt
– every year – thanks to a capitalist system of medicine that seeks
to squeeze money from the most
vulnerable in society. Decades of
corporate-funded propaganda has
kept this system in place.
This is the way the Conservative
Party, and its corporate backers, want
the British system to work. Prime
Minister Theresa May’s government
is at the sharp-end of a slow plan
to bloat the NHS with semi-privatisation, cutting budgets, decreasing
efficiency and undermining public
faith in the system, until the people
become turkeys voting for Christmas
and demand “change.”

Jeff Bezos: Should forget philanthropy,
and pay tax instead.

couraged rich individuals in the US
and abroad to devote much of their
wealth to charity. Buffett and Gates
themselves have been generous
with their own personal fortunes.
But, as I have discussed in the Florida Tax Review, there is a downside
to the Buffett-Gates Giving Pledge:
Under current law, the federal treasury loses substantial revenue when
appreciated stock is donated by a
US citizen to charity. When Buffett’s
Berkshire shares, Gates’s Microsoft
stock or Bezos’s Amazon shares are
transferred to charity, and the federal Treasury loses the income tax
on the capital gain which would
have been realised had that stock
been sold. Moreover, such gifts of
appreciated stock to charity remove
these assets from the coverage of
the federal estate tax. The upshot
is that the federal treasury receives
neither income tax nor transfer taxes when billionaires such as Buffett,
Gates, or Bezos contribute their appreciated stock to charity, stock on
which these business founders have
paid no federal income tax.
Besides their efforts for charity,
Buffett and Gates have been outspoken in calling for higher income
taxes on the rich (the so-called

Insights
“Buffett Rule”) and for the preservation of the federal estate tax.
Notwithstanding their advocacy of
higher taxes for the rich, Buffett and
Gates conduct their own affairs to
avoid any federal taxation on their
contributions of their appreciated
shares to charity. This is perfectly
legal, but hard to square with the
Buffett-Gates programme of taxing
the affluent.
There is, in short, considerable
tension between the Buffett-Gates
project to protect the federal fisc
and the Buffett-Gates effort to
encourage philanthropy as that
effort has in practice been implemented.
Mr. Bezos can now set an instructive example. He can sell Amazon
shares, pay tax, and then contribute
the net after-tax proceeds to charity. This would produce less for charity but more for the federal fisc. In
addition or instead, Mr. Bezos could

make a voluntary contribution to
the federal treasury to compensate
for some or all of the income, estate, and gift taxes avoided by his
contributions to charity.
Warren Buffett has eloquently
observed that large fortunes such
as his result not just from the skill
and work of entrepreneurs such as
Gates and Bezos, but also from the
taxpayer-provided public services
which support these entrepreneurial efforts. Mr. Bezos could open a
new chapter in charitable giving by
acknowledging the role of public
overheads in facilitating his success and by paying some tax on the
gains he will donate to charity. CT
Edward J. Zelinsky’s latest book is
The Origins of the Ownership Society:
How the Defined Contribution
Paradigm Changed America. This
article was originally published at
Oxford university’s oup.com

Why should bosses make
so much more than staff?
Unlike movie stars and athletes, skyrocketing pay for CEOs
has nothing to do with markets, writes Steven Clifford

C

EO pay at America’s 500 largest
companies averaged $13.1-million in 2016. That’s 347 times
what the average employee
makes. So CEOs make a lot of money. But, some say, so do athletes and
movie stars. Why pick on corporate
bosses, then?
First, because the market sets
compensation for athletes and movie

stars, but not for CEOs. Teams and
movie studios bid for athletes and
movie stars. CEO pay is set by a rigged
system that has nothing to do with
supply and demand.
NBA teams bid for LeBron James
because his skills are portable: He’d
be a superstar on any team. CEOs’
skills are much more closely tied to
their knowledge of a single compa-

ny – its finances, products, personnel, culture, competitors, etc. Such
knowledge and skills are best gained
working within the company, and are
not worth much outside.
In fact, a CEO jumping between
large companies happens less than
once a year. And when they jump,
they usually fail.
Lacking a market, CEO pay is set
by a series of complex administrative
pay practices. Usually a board, often
dominated by other sitting or retired
CEOs, sets their CEO’s pay based on
the compensation of other highly
paid CEOs. The CEO can then double
or triple this target by surpassing negotiated bonus goals.
This amount then increases target
pay for his or her peer CEOs, giving
another bump. Since 1978, these annual rounds of CEO pay leapfrog have
produced a 1,000 percent inflationadjusted increase in CEO pay. At the
same time, the bottom 90 percent
of American workers have seen their
real incomes decrease by three percent.
American workers were once rewarded for productivity. Real wages
and productivity rose in tandem at
about three percent annually from
1945 through the mid-70s. But since
then the bosses have taken it all.
Although productivity growth increased real per capita GDP by 84 percent over the last 36 years, real wages
have remained essentially flat.
Where did the money go? It went
to the 1 percent, and especially to
the 0.1 percent. The latter group, a
mere 124,000 households, pocketed
40 percent of all economic gains.
Business executives, CEOs, or others
whose compensation is guided by
CEO pay constitute two-thirds of this
sliver. In other words, it’s business
www.coldtype.net | August 2017 | ColdType

49

Insights
executives – not movie stars, professional athletes, or heiresses – who
grabbed the dollars that once flowed
to the American worker.
Outsize CEO compensation harms
American companies, and not just in
the tens of millions they waste on executive pay. The effects on employee
morale is much more costly. When the
boss makes 347 times what you do, it’s
difficult to swallow his canard that
“there’s no I in team.”
Worse, CEO pay encourages a
short-term focus. Instead of making
productive investments, companies
buy back their own stock to keep
its price high, which boosts their
own pay check. From 2005 to 2014,
stock buybacks by America’s 500
largest public companies totalled
$3.7-trillion. This consumed over
half of their net income. That cash
could have been invested in plants
and equipment, new technology,
employee training, and research and
development. Instead, corporate

America cut R&D by 50 percent, essentially eating the seed corn.
If athletes and movie stars were
paid less, team owners and studios
would simply make more. The hundreds of millions paid to CEOs, on the
other hand, hurts their companies,
employees, and our economy. It’s a
principal driver of our country’s startling income inequality.
One of the few checks on CEO pay
is a rule under the Dodd-Frank financial reform law requiring companies
to disclose the ratio of CEO to average
worker pay. Congress is now considering repealing this rule. If you think
CEOs making 347 times what you do
shouldn’t be secret, maybe it’s time to
let your representatives know.
CT
Steven Clifford is the former CEO
of King Broadcasting and the author
of The CEO Pay Machine: How It
Trashes America and How to Stop
It. This article was first published at
www.otherwords.org

In praise of income tax
on its 100th birthday
The establishment of income tax should be regarded
as a nation-building event, writes Linda McQuaig

G

iven the exhausting recent
round of celebrating significant national anniversaries –
Vimy’s 100th, Canada’s 150th
– some Canadians may feel partiedout when family and friends gather
again in a few months to celebrate
the 100th anniversary of Canada’s
income tax.

50 ColdType | August 2017 | www.coldtype.net

Of course, many will feel there’s
nothing to celebrate. After decades
of tax phobia, incited by business
commentators and right-wing
think tanks such as the Fraser Institute, some Canadians may well
regard the 100th anniversary of the
income tax – September 20 – as a
day of infamy. The Fraser Institute

is already planning to use the occasion to stir up fresh tax rage in the
land.
That’s why it’s worth pointing
out that, in any thoughtful assessment, the establishment of an income tax would be regarded as a
nation-building event – ultimately
as important as what was achieved
on the battlefield at Vimy or the
conference room in Charlottetown.
The income tax made it possible for Canada to develop into the
advanced society that we are today,
enabling us to raise the revenue to
fight World War I and then create
strong public programmes in health
care, education and social insurance
that have pushed us toward the top
of every global index of human development.
While the Fraser Institute crowd
always tries to convince us we can’t
afford the things we want, we actually can – thanks to the income tax.
Individually, we may struggle to
provide for our needs, but when we
pool our resources, we’re fabulously
rich. This explains why collectively
we can create an excellent public
health care system for all, while
the US, abandoning its citizens to
the marketplace, ends up with a far
more costly system that leaves tens
of millions uninsured.
In addition to raising revenue,
the income tax is designed to ensure the burden of supporting government is shared fairly among
citizens. So, unlike other taxes, its
rates are “progressive” – imposing
a heavier burden on those with bigger incomes.
Its role as a “make-the-rich-pay”
tax goes all the way back to the beginning. Pressure for the tax arose
among working people who were

Insights
risking their lives in the trenches
of World War I, while back home
Canada’s elite grew wildly rich in
the revved-up war economy. As
the Conservative government considered imposing conscription, a
rallying cry arose from labour and
farm organisations: “No conscription of men without conscription of
wealth!”
The day after Parliament passed
the contentious conscription bill,
the government announced plans
for an income tax.
In recent decades, however, the
Fraser Institute and much of the
business community have conducted a relentless – and fairly successful – campaign aimed at vilifying
taxes in general, and taxes on the
rich in particular.
They’ve succeeded in whittling
down the progressivity in the income tax. In 1966, the top marginal rate was 80 percent on income
above $400,000 ($3-million in today’s dollars). Today, the top rate
(which varies between provinces)
is typically just above 50 percent.
They’ve also won deep cuts to
corporate taxes and taxes on capital. Along with sales tax reductions,
these cuts have left a gaping hole in
government finances.
If Canadian governments (at
all levels) collected the same percentage of tax as they did in 2000,
they would have had an additional
$78-billion in revenue every year –
enough to fund new programs like
national childcare and pharmacare.
Instead, we watch as health care,
education and other vital programs
face ever more cuts, leaving us believing the narrative that government must partner with the private
sector if we want these services

– even though that will ultimately
drive up costs.
Canadian politicians have largely
capitulated to the anti-tax demands
of the business elite, apparently
fearful of threats that otherwise the
rich will leave the country.
Such threats will no doubt continue.
A better response to them may
be the one delivered many years
ago by William Jennings Bryan, the
fiery American Populist Party leader
in the 1890s, when populists truly
championed the people.
In an impassioned 1894 speech
that’s worth recalling as we celebrate our income tax’s centennial,

Bryan urged the US Congress not
to be intimidated by the hundreds
of wealthy Americans who signed
a petition threatening to leave the
country if an income tax were introduced:
“We can better afford to lose
them and their fortunes than risk
the contaminating influence of their
presence,” he roared. “Let them depart! And as they leave without regret the land of their birth, let them
go with the poet’s curse ringing in
their ears!”
CT
Linda McQuaig is a journalist and
author. Her column appears monthly
in the Toronto Star newspaper.